Paths of Glory (1957)

Official trailer

Paths of Glory is Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 American war film adapting Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 novel. The film depicts a 1916 French Army operation during the First World War where Colonel Dax leads his regiment in a doomed assault on the German position called the Anthill.

The attack fails as commanding officers knew it would. The French generals later court-martial three randomly selected soldiers for cowardice to deflect responsibility for the failure.

Colonel Dax, who’s also a civilian lawyer, defends the three soldiers at the court-martial that reads as a kangaroo court. The verdict has been determined before the proceedings begin. Kirk Douglas plays Colonel Dax. Ralph Meeker plays Corporal Philippe Paris. Adolphe Menjou plays General Broulard. George Macready plays General Mireau. Wayne Morris plays Lieutenant Roget. Richard Anderson plays Major Saint-Auban. Joe Turkel plays Private Pierre Arnaud. Timothy Carey plays Private Maurice Ferol. Kubrick, Calder Willingham, and Jim Thompson wrote the screenplay.

This is the war film that makes me angriest, and I think that’s the highest praise I can give it. Kubrick sends men to die for a general’s vanity, then puts three of them on trial to cover for him, and he never lets the officers off the hook. I think it’s the best thing Kirk Douglas ever did, and I’d rank it above most of the famous Kubrick films that came after it.

Bryna Productions produced the film on a budget of approximately 1 million dollars.

Stanley Kubrick’s first major film, Paths of Glory, is one of the foundational anti-war productions in American cinema. Kubrick was twenty-nine during production.

The film works as a direct critique of military command authority instead of as conventional war depiction. The French Army court-martial captures actual patterns of First World War officer scapegoating that historical investigation has continued to document. The film was banned in France for approximately eighteen years after its release due to French government objections to its depiction of French military leadership.

Kirk Douglas had used his Bryna Productions to develop the film independently after major studios refused to fund the project. The Douglas-Kubrick collaboration would extend through Spartacus (1960) before ending due to professional conflicts.

The Trench Sequences

Kubrick filmed the trench sequences with long tracking shots that move through the French positions as Colonel Dax inspects his troops. The trenches become a physical space the audience moves through alongside Dax, and I feel the mud and the crowding in a way conventional war staging never gives me. Those tracking shots are why I think Kubrick was already a great director at twenty-nine, before anyone had decided he was one.

The trench conditions reflect real research into actual First World War French Army practices. The clothing, equipment, fortifications, and routines all reflect historical conditions instead of dramatic reconstruction. Kubrick consistently emphasized research-based accuracy across his later entries in the genre. The pattern of detailed research informing dramatic depiction has continued through his later filmography including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), and other productions.

The Court-Martial

The court-martial is a kangaroo court that has settled its verdict before the proceedings begin.

The judges interrupt Dax’s defense and refuse evidence that contradicts the prosecution, and the legal process bends to whatever the command needs. I find these scenes close to unbearable. Douglas plays Dax’s fury with a lawyer’s control, and watching him lose an argument he’s clearly winning is the most enraging stretch of film I know.

This scapegoating reflects actual events that occurred across multiple national armies during the First World War. The French Army executed approximately six hundred soldiers for offenses during the conflict. Many of these executions reflected command failures instead of individual misconduct. Later French government investigations have rehabilitated some of the executed soldiers posthumously. Paths of Glory captures this historical pattern with significant accuracy. The film works as document of institutional violence that later war cinema has continued to address.

The Closing German Singer

The film closes with a German woman being forced to sing for French soldiers in a tavern. She begins crying as she sings a folk song. The French soldiers initially laugh at her distress. They gradually begin humming along with the song. Recognition of shared humanity, which the surrounding war has temporarily suspended, briefly replaces the combat opposition between French and German.

This closing sequence strikes a tone most anti-war films avoid.

They end with anger, despair or polemic, and Paths of Glory ends with a brief moment of recognition between enemies. That scene is the reason this film gets a 9 from me. After all the cruelty from the men in charge, Kubrick shows me the soldiers humming along with a weeping woman they were jeering at a minute earlier, and it wrecks me. People still argue about whether that moment means hope or only relief, and I think the ambiguity is exactly right.

Does Paths of Glory still hold up?

Kubrick made his first major film with Paths of Glory, one of the foundational anti-war productions in American cinema.

The trench sequences are embodied cinematography that gives audiences understanding of conditions conventional treatment would have prevented. The court-martial captures historical patterns of First World War military scapegoating with considerable accuracy. The closing German singer sequence produces emotional foundation that pure political critique wouldn’t have provided.

Watch it if you care about war films, about Kubrick, or about how institutions eat the people they’re supposed to protect. It gets a 9 because it’s furious, precise and moving at once, and because that last scene has every right to move me after everything that came before it. It’s the Kubrick film I’d hand to anyone who thinks his work is cold.

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