Paths of Glory (1957)
Paths of Glory arrived in 1957 as something of an anomaly: an American studio picture that had the nerve to portray the French military command of the First World War as venal, cowardly, and casually murderous. Based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 novel, itself drawn from a real court martial scandal from 1915, the film follows a French colonel who finds himself fighting not the Germans but his own high command, after three ordinary soldiers are selected as scapegoats for a failed assault ordered by generals more concerned with their careers than their men's lives. The subject matter was inflammatory enough that the film was banned in France until 1975, and was refused exhibition in several other countries for years after its release. That kind of reception, whatever you make of the film itself, tells you something about the nerve it struck.
The production sits at an interesting crossroads in Stanley Kubrick's early career. By 1957 he had already made a handful of features on shoestring budgets, including Killer's Kiss and The Killing, the latter marking his first serious critical breakthrough. Paths of Glory was a step up in scale and ambition, produced through Bryna Productions (Kirk Douglas's own company) in partnership with United Artists and Harris-Kubrick Productions, and shot largely in West Germany to take advantage of suitable locations and a favourable budget. Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, a trio whose sensibilities pull in slightly different directions, which perhaps explains why the film is at once morally furious and formally disciplined, occasionally to the point of feeling controlled rather than volatile.
Kirk Douglas, whose production company drove the project into existence, plays Colonel Dax, and he brings the full weight of his movie-star physicality to a role that requires him to be both righteous and impotent, a man who speaks truth to power and watches it make no difference whatsoever. Opposite him, Adolphe Menjou and George Macready play the generals pulling the strings, both polished but unremarkable in the way that makes perfect sense for men of institutional comfort, men for whom the theatre of rank matters more than anything happening in the mud outside. Ralph Meeker and Wayne Morris are among the soldiers caught in the machinery, their ordinariness doing the film's thematic work as much as the dialogue does.
Cinematographer Georg Krause shoots the film in high-contrast black and white that moves between two very different visual registers. The headquarters and chateau interiors are wide, geometrically composed, all marble floors and receding corridors, spaces that dwarf the men walking through them and suggest the cold logic of institutional power. The battlefield sequences abandon that geometry entirely: the camera tracks along the trenches at shoulder height, restless and close, and then moves through the assault itself in something approaching real time chaos. Gerald Fried's score is spare and martial, with muffled drums that press against the action without overwhelming it, the kind of musical texture that accompanies rather than editorialises. Editor Eva Kroll cuts between those two worlds with a rhythm that keeps the film's 88 minutes feeling purposeful, the contrast between the composed and the chaotic doing much of the emotional arguing for the picture.
For a companion piece in the same year's cinema, The Seventh Seal makes for interesting company: two 1957 films using very different cinematic languages to ask whether human institutions can be trusted with human lives. I also covered 2001: A Space Odyssey, which shows where Kubrick's formal instincts eventually led him, though that is a very different kind of film from this one.
I will be straight: I came away from Paths of Glory underwhelmed, which is not the done thing to admit about a Kubrick, let alone one this garlanded.
It is a First World War film about a colonel, played by Kirk Douglas, who fights to defend three of his men after they are blamed for a doomed offensive, and there is plenty in it to admire. The attack itself, the assault on the position they call the Anthill, is fantastic, exactly the sort of big, chaotic war set-piece I love, the kind of thing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly stages so gloriously, and that 1917, a better war film that arrived decades later, does better still.
The trouble is everything around it. The acting is fine, the plot is fine, the anti-war fury is clearly heartfelt, and yet the whole way through I kept waiting for the film to land some devastating blow that would justify its towering reputation, and it never quite arrived. I could sense the greatness it is supposed to have without ever really feeling it for myself. Nothing in it is wrong, exactly. It just left me a touch cold, forever expecting more.
So I will land where I must, even against the crowd. This is a very good film, and I would not talk a soul out of watching it; the craft is undeniable and the anger behind it plainly sincere. But "very good" is as far as I can go. For all its standing, and Kubrick's, it never once tipped over into the greatness I had been promised. Three and a half stars, a fine war picture that stops a fair way short of the masterpiece everyone told me it was.
Paths of Glory occupies a strange position in the war film canon: widely taught, frequently cited, and genuinely important as a piece of anti-war cinema that arrived when Hollywood still largely preferred to make war look heroic. Its anger at the officer class, at the way armies consume ordinary men to protect the reputations of extraordinary ones, remains pointed and relevant. Whether the film fully delivers on that anger, whether the craft serves the fury or contains it, is precisely the kind of question a film at this level invites you to sit with. Not every picture that earns its reputation earns it in ways you can personally feel. Sometimes the gap between what a film means and what it does to you in the watching is the most honest thing you can say about it.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 1957 | Watched: 2026-09-22
Trailer
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