Paths of Glory


Paths of Glory is a 1957 American anti-war film co-written and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb. Set during World War I, the film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refuse to continue a suicidal attack, after which Dax attempts to defend them against a charge of cowardice in a court-martial.
In 1992, the film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

Plot

The film begins with a voiceover describing the trench warfare situation of World War I up to 1916. In a château, General Georges Broulard, a member of the French General Staff, asks his subordinate, the ambitious General Mireau, to send his division on a suicide mission to take a well-defended German position called the "Anthill". Mireau initially refuses, citing the impossibility of success, but when Broulard mentions a potential promotion, Mireau quickly convinces himself the attack will succeed.
Mireau proceeds to walk through the trenches, asking several soldiers, "Ready to kill more Germans?" He throws a private out of the regiment for showing signs of shell shock. Mireau leaves the detailed planning of the attack to Colonel Dax of the 701st regiment, despite Dax's protests that the only result of the attack will be to weaken the French Army with heavy losses for no benefit.
Prior to the attack, a drunken lieutenant named Roget, leading a night-time scouting mission, sends one of his two men ahead. Overcome by fear while waiting for the man's return, Roget lobs a grenade and retreats. Corporal Paris, the other soldier on the mission, finds the body of the scout, who has been killed by the grenade, and confronts Roget. Roget denies any wrongdoing and falsifies his report to Colonel Dax.
The next morning, the attack on the Anthill is a failure. Dax leads the first wave of soldiers over the top into no man's land under heavy fire. None of the men reach the German trenches, and B Company refuses to leave their own trench after seeing the first wave sustain heavy casualties. Mireau, enraged, orders his artillery to open fire on them to force them onto the battlefield. The artillery commander refuses to fire on his own men without written confirmation of the order. Meanwhile, Dax returns to the trenches and tries to rally B Company to join the battle, but as he climbs out of the trench, the body of a dead French soldier knocks him down.
To deflect blame for the attack's failure, Mireau decides to court martial 100 of the soldiers for cowardice. Broulard persuades him to reduce the number to three, one from each company. Corporal Paris is chosen because his commanding officer Roget wishes to keep him from testifying about Roget's actions in the scouting mission. Private Ferol is picked by his commanding officer because he is a "social undesirable." The last man, Private Arnaud, is chosen randomly by lot, despite having been cited for bravery twice previously and having actually participated in the attack.
Dax, who was a criminal defense lawyer in civilian life, volunteers to defend the men at their court-martial. The trial however, is a farce. There is no formal written indictment, a court stenographer is not present, and the court refuses to admit evidence that would support acquittal. In his closing statement, Dax denounces the proceedings: "Gentlemen of the court, to find these men guilty would be a crime to haunt each of you till the day you die." Nonetheless, the three men are sentenced to death.
The night before the scheduled execution, Dax confronts Broulard at a ball, with sworn statements by witnesses attesting to Mireau's order to shell his own trenches, in an attempt to blackmail the General Staff into sparing the three men. Broulard takes the statements but brusquely dismisses Dax, returning to the ball on the floor below.
The next morning, the three men are taken out to be shot by firing squad. Dax, suspecting Roget for his nomination of Paris, forces Roget to lead the executions. While a sobbing Ferol is blindfolded, Paris refuses Roget's offer of a blindfold and reacts defiantly to Roget's meek apology. Arnaud, meanwhile, is so badly injured after having started a fight in prison that he must be carried out in a stretcher and tied to the post. All three men are then executed.
Following the executions, Broulard breakfasts with the gloating Mireau. Broulard reveals he has invited Dax to attend and tells Mireau that he will be investigated for the order to fire on his own men. Mireau storms out, protesting that he has been made a scapegoat, threatening Dax of insubordination. Broulard then blithely offers Mireau's command to Dax, admiringly assuming that Dax's attempts to stop the executions were a ploy to gain Mireau's job. Discovering that Dax was in fact sincere, Broulard rebukes him for his idealism, while the disgusted Dax calls Broulard a "degenerate, sadistic old man."
The day following the execution, some of Dax's soldiers are carousing at an inn while Dax observes their behavior from a distance. An attractive captive German girl is brought onstage for the soldiers' entertainment, and they clap and whistle lustily at her presence. Their mood shifts, however, as they listen to the girl fearfully singing "The Faithful Hussar"—they hum along with her singing, a strikingly human moment following the unjust execution of their fellow soldiers by firing squad.
They are unaware that orders have come for them to return to the front. Dax allows the men to enjoy a few more minutes before they are called back to duty. His face hardens as he returns to his quarters.

Cast

Production

Background

The title of Cobb's novel came from the ninth stanza of Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th'inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

The book was a minor success when published in 1935, retelling the true-life affair of four French soldiers who were executed to set an example to the rest of the troops. The novel was adapted to the stage the same year by Sidney Howard, World War I veteran and scriptwriter of Gone with the Wind. The play was a flop on Broadway, because of its harsh anti-war scenes that alienated the audience. Nonetheless, Howard continued to believe in the relevance of the subject matter and thought it should be made into a film, writing, "It seems to me that our motion picture industry must feel something of a sacred obligation to make the picture." Fulfilling Howard's "sacred obligation", Stanley Kubrick decided to adapt it to the screen after he remembered reading the book when he was younger. Kubrick and his partners purchased the film rights from Cobb's widow for $10,000.
Gray's stanza reflects Kubrick's feelings about war as well, and that becomes clear in the narrative of the film - a long battle for something with such an unimportant name as the "Ant Hill". Some of Kubrick's unrealized projects contained themes of war, as well. Kubrick once told a New York Times journalist:
"Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved – that about sums it up. I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure".

Kubrick's filmography shares many visual elements but thematically, the most frequent subject – even more than sexuality – is war. Dr. Strangelove presents war as a farce, its absurdity and pointlessness evoked through comedy. Fear and Desire demonstrates that the extreme stress and trauma of war can lead to the mental breakdown of soldiers to a point where they are insanely committing war crimes against a civilian population, thereby effectively abandoning the waged purpose of the war in the first place. Full Metal Jacket enters the mind of a soldier and tells the audience that they may not like what they hear. Spartacus also shows the horrors of war, much like Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange with its many references to World War II and other conflicts.
Paths of Glory is based loosely on the true story of the Souain corporals affair, when four French soldiers were executed in 1915, during World War I under General Géraud Réveilhac, for failure to follow orders. The soldiers were exonerated posthumously, in 1934. The novel is about the French execution of innocent men to strengthen others' resolve to fight. The French Army did carry out military executions for cowardice, as did most of the other major participants, excluding the United States of America and Australia. The United States sentenced 24 soldiers to death for cowardice, but the sentences were never carried out. However, a significant point in the film is the practice of selecting individuals at random and executing them as a punishment for the sins of the whole group. This is similar to the Roman practice of decimation, which was rarely used by the French Army in World War I. A little known exception is the French decimation of the 10e Compagnie of 8 Battalion of the Régiment Mixte de Tirailleurs Algériens. During the retreat, at the beginning of the war, these French-African soldiers refused an order to attack. They were shot on December 15, 1914, near Zillebeke in Flanders. Paths of Glory takes place in France, but Kubrick's feelings on the topic stem more from his American upbringing. When General Mireau says “show me a patriot, and I’ll show you an honest man”, Colonel Dax remarks that Samuel Johnson once said: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. The context in which Johnson said this has been lost to time.

Development

Kubrick once said of his decision to make a war film: "One of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual or our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation. Further, war acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings. Attitudes crystallise and come out into the open. Conflict is natural, when it would in a less critical situation have to be introduced almost as a contrivance, and would thus appear forced or, even worse, false."
Although Kubrick's previous film The Killing had failed at the box office, it had managed to land on several critical Top-Ten lists for the year. Dore Schary, then head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, liked the film and hired Kubrick and Harris to develop film stories from MGM's slush pile of scripts and purchased novels. Finding nothing they liked, Kubrick remembered reading Cobb's book at the age of fourteen and the 'great impact' it had upon him and suggested it as their next project. Schary strongly doubted the commercial success of the story, which had already been turned down by every other major studio.
After Schary was fired by MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris managed to interest Kirk Douglas in a script version that Kubrick had done with Calder Willingham. After reading the script, Kirk Douglas was impressed and managed to get an advance for a $1 million budget from United Artists to help produce the film.  Of the roughly $1 million budget, more than a third was allocated to Kirk Douglas' salary.  Prior to the involvement of Douglas and his Bryna Production Company, no studio had showed interest in the seemingly noncommercial subject matter and filming in black and white.  MGM rejected the idea of the film based on fears that the film would be unfavourable to European distributors and audiences. United Artists agreed to back it with Douglas as the star.

Writing

Kubrick eventually hired Calder Willingham to work on the script of Paths of Glory, of which Jim Thompson had written earlier drafts. The specific contributions by Kubrick, Thompson, and Willingham to the final script were disputed, and the matter went to arbitration with the Writers' Guild. Willingham claimed that Thompson had minimal involvement in the final script of the film, claiming responsibility for 99 percent of Paths of Glory for himself and that Thompson had not written any of the dialogue. When Thompson's draft screenplay was compared to the final film, it was clear that Thompson had written seven scenes, including the reconnaissance mission and the soldiers the night before their executions by firing squad. In the end, the Writers Guild attributed the script in the order of Kubrick, Willingham and then Thompson.
Parts of the screenplay were taken from Cobb's work verbatim. However, Kubrick made several changes to the narrative of the novel in his adaptation, most notably his shift of focus to Colonel Dax, as opposed to Paris, Ferol and Arnaud as in the novel.
Primarily, Kubrick and Thompson had added a happy ending to the film to make the film more commercial to the general public, where the men's lives are saved from execution at the last minute by the general. However, these changes were reversed back more closely to the original novel at the demand of Kirk Douglas. On the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, James B. Harris claims to have gotten this ending past distributors by sending the entire script instead of just the reversed ending, in the knowledge that those distributors would not read through the whole script again. After viewing the film, United Artists was happy with the changes and left the ending as it is.

Filming

Production took place entirely in Bavaria, Germany, especially at the Schleissheim Palace near Munich. Timothy Carey was fired during production. He was reportedly extremely difficult to work with, even to the extent of faking his own kidnapping, holding up the whole production. He was replaced in the scenes remaining to be shot with a double. The film cost slightly less than $1 million and just about broke even.
Due to having three years military training, around 600 German police officers were used as extras for soldiers. The last scenes filmed were those that take place on the battlefield. For the construction of the battlefield, Kubrick hired 5,000 square yards of land from a local farmer. It took Kubrick a month to set-up the filming of the assault, arranging props and tearing up the field to look like a war zone. For the filming of the battle sequence, the battlefield was divided into five regions where explosive charges were specifically placed. This made it easier for Kubrick to film the dying of extras as he split the extras into five groups, one for each of the regions, and each man would die in his own zone by an explosion that was near him.
An early critical test of Kubrick's obsession with control on the set came during the making of Paths of Glory. As recalled by Kirk Douglas:
The only female character in the film, the woman who sings "The Faithful Hussar", is portrayed by German actress Christiane Harlan. An effective scene towards the end of the film shows actress Harlan briefly appearing to sing a German song timidly evoking emotion in both the audience and the soldiers. She and Kubrick later married; the couple remained together until his death in 1999, it was on set that they originally had met.
Kubrick's use of visual imagery and mise-en-scene:
Paths of Glory employs both camera-work and audio cues to create a sense of realism, thus making it easier for the audience to sympathise with the plight of the accused soldiers. In the beginning of the film a snare drum plays, and the music is reminiscent of war era newsreels. During the battle sequences, the camera keeps pace with the soldiers but in other ways, the shots looks like old trench warfare footage from World War I. The film's choice of black and white further emphasises its similarity to the actual newsreels of the conflict.
Kubrick's vision of war was far bleaker than that of some other films of the era, which also influenced the director's choice to shoot the picture in black and white. The visuals also allow the audience to see the difference between life in the trenches and life in the command. From the opulent mansion of the high-ranking officers, the audience notices wide shots from the exterior and the interior. The viewer misses nothing; every decadent piece of furniture, bauble and jewellery that the high officers have, in sharp contrast to the trenches where the shots are much tighter. Close ups and point-of-view shots are cramped and tight, suffocating for the audience. Switching to a shot in front of Dax's person, e.g. a walking shot, the audience becomes much like the other soldiers accompanying him in the trenches, feeling stuck and trapped in the confined and dangerous space.

Score and Kubrick's use of sounds and their connotations

The musical score by Gerald Fried makes extensive use of percussion instruments, specifically military drums.
Kubrick used sound, or the lack thereof, to build tension and suspense in the film, particularly towards the beginning when the three soldiers are given orders to check on the Ant Hill. This scene is in silence, with no use of diegetic/non-diegetic sound, working well to add depth and rawness. Much of what the viewer can hear throughout the film is explosions in the distance and the sound of a whistle being blown, further adding to the overall documentary style of the film. The lack of a big bold score gives no suggestion of heroism to the plot of the film, and the sounds of people dying are a common trope associated with Stanley Kubrick's films. The song towards the ending happens within the narrative. In the tavern with the French soldiers of Dax's regiment, a young woman sings a traditional German folk song of that era, "Der treue Husar". With Kubrick's use of mise-en-scene, the audience is able to see the German woman's performance brought the men to tears through various close-ups and angles. The troopers begin to hum and eventually sing along to the tune in an expression of their basic humanity. Paths of Glory later ends in the same way it began with the familiar snare/drum roll used in the opening, indicative of a lack of change throughout the film. Kubrick's use of sounds and song functions as a kind of narration for the audience, linking each sound to a later or earlier scene in the film.

Release

The film premiered in Munich on Nov 1, 1957. It was released in the United States in December 1957. It was considered a modest box office success and earned Kubrick critical acclaim.

Controversy

On its release, the film's anti-military tone was subject to criticism and censorship.
The film was nominated and managed to gain several international awards and accolades as it garnered many positive reviews thus helping to establish Kubrick's already growing reputation. The film was nominated for a BAFTA Award under the category Best Film but lost to The Bridge on the River Kwai. The film also won a Jussi Awards' Diploma of merit. In 1959 the film was nominated for a Writers' Guild of America Award but ultimately lost. It won the prestigious Grand Prix of the Belgian Film Critics Association.
The film holds a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 55 reviews and an average rating of 8.9/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Paths of Glory is a transcendentally humane war movie from Stanley Kubrick, with impressive, protracted battle sequences and a knock-out ending". Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert added this film to his "Great Movies" list on February 25, 2005. Gene Siskel, on a section of Siskel and Ebert's at the Movies show regarding Stanley Kubrick films, declared Paths of Glory to be one of the all-time great films and "almost" as good as Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
Director Robert Zemeckis paid homage to Paths of Glory with the 1991 Tales from the Crypt episode "Yellow". The episode was an adaptation of the 1952 Shock SuspenStories story, "Yellow!", about a WWII U.S. Army colonel whose son, a lieutenant, exhibits cowardice and is sentenced to face the firing squad. The father makes the son falsely believe that the firing squad will be firing blanks, so that the son will not exhibit cowardice before his execution. Zemeckis changed the setting to World War I, and cast Kirk Douglas and his son Eric Douglas in the father and son roles.
David Simon, creator of critically acclaimed series The Wire, has said that Paths of Glory was a key influence on the HBO crime drama. The influence of the film comes in its depiction of the tribulations of "middle management", in the form of Dax's unsuccessful attempt to protect his troops against the inhumane ambitions of his superiors, which in turn influenced The Wire's depiction of various institutions acting against individuals.

Preservation and restoration

In 1992, the film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In October and November 2004 the film was shown at the London Film Festival by the British Film Institute. It was carefully remastered over a period of several years; the original film elements were found to be damaged. However, with the aid of several modern digital studios in Los Angeles the film was completely restored and remastered for modern cinema. In addition, Stanley Kubrick's widow Christiane made a guest appearance at the start of the performance.

Home media

released the VHS format on July 21, 1997 followed by the DVD version on June 29, 1999. The Criterion Collection's first release of the film was for a Laserdisc release in 1989. The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection with a high-definition digital transfer on October 26, 2010.
Eureka released a UK Region B Blu-Ray in 2016 as part of their Masters of Cinema line.