Paths of Glory movie review & film summary (1957)
If the singing of "La Marseillaise" in a bar in "Casablanca" was a call to patriotism, this scene is an argument against it. It creates a moment of quiet and tenderness in the daily horror these soldiers occupy -- a world in which generals casually estimated that 55 percent of these very men might be killed in a stupid attack and found that acceptable.
Songs at the ends of dramas usually make us feel better. They are part of closure. This song at the end of this movie makes us feel more forlorn. It is not a release, but a twist of Kubrick's emotional knife. When Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make an anti-war movie, because action argues in favor of itself, he could not have been thinking of "Paths of Glory," and no wonder: Because of its harsh portrait of the French army, the film was banned in France until 1975.
The film, made in 1957, is typical of Kubrick's earlier work in being short (84 minutes), tight, told with an economy approaching terseness. Later his films would expand in length and epic scope, sometimes to their advantage, sometimes not. It does however contain examples of one of his favorite visual strategies, the extended camera movement that unfolds to reveal details of a set or location, and continues long after we expect it to be over.
Early in the film, the camera precedes its hero, Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) on an inspection tour of a muddy fortified trench that goes on and on and on. Later the camera follows doomed men into No Man's Land, tracking alongside them through mud and shell blasts, trenches and craters, past bodies that drop before our eyes. Still later, there is a dolly shot through a formal ball to find a French general. And toward the end, an elaborate military parade for a firing squad, with the camera preceding three condemned men as they walk and walk and walk toward their deaths.
These shots of long duration impress the importance of their subjects upon us: The permanence of trench warfare, the devastation of attack, the hypocrisy of the ruling class, the dread of the condemned men. If some of Kubrick's later extended shots, including the endless tracking shot down long hotel corridors in "The Shining" (1979), seem like exercises in style, the shots in "Paths of Glory" are aimed straight at our emotions.
The story is simply summarized. French and German armies face each other along 500 miles of fortified trenches. Both sides have been dug in for two years. Any attempt at an advance brings a dreadful human cost in lives. The effete little Gen. Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) orders his subordinate, Gen. Mireau (George Macready), to take an impregnable German position, "The Anthill," by, incredibly, the day after tomorrow. Mireau argues that it cannot be done. Broulard thinks perhaps it can be accomplished with no more than 55 percent casualties. He hints that there is a promotion and a third star for the general who does it. The two-star Gen. Mireau goes through the motions of protest: "The lives of 8,000 men! What is my ambition against that? My reputation?" And then: "But, by god, we might just do it!"
