Paths Of Glory
It’s possible that the measure of the depths of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man can be measured in terms of our military establishment and mindset, as would be the case for Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 achievement, kind of a mirror image to his later Full Metal Jacket. Whereas Full Metal showed how young marine recruits have their humanity trained and beaten out of them, this film shows the utter contempt for human life and immorality exhibited by the aristocratic French generals in World War I, most eerily defined by George MacReady’s General Mireau, a man who is ready, willing, and able to literally slaughter his own troops if they do not follow his orders to the letter. The plot concerns him taking command of a platoon led by Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) and ordering them to take an anthill held by the Germans, only for the soldiers to find that it is literally a suicide mission and, after many of their numbers are massacred, retreating to safety from the hopeless pursuit. Mireau becomes enraged and decrees that an example must be set, and after some negotiation, it is decided that three random surviving soldiers will be tried for cowardice in a kangaroo court martial and summarily executed via firing squad. While many have maintained that this is an anti-war film, it can more accurately be said to be an anti-military mindset story (and was thus banned in many European countries for just that reason), a decrying against those individuals who would prefer the “freedom” of enacting martial law against any dissenters to their command, all the while enjoying the creature comforts like sumptuous dinners and ballroom dancing which the working class soldiers are summarily denied. As for the acting, Douglas stands as the voice of reason for the story, gamely serving as counsel for the condemned men without realizing that their fate is already sealed; As the three doomed, innocent soldiers, Ralph Meeker, Timothy Carey, and Joe Turkel are uniformly excellent, convinced at first that Douglas will find a way out for them, then becoming ever more desperate and anguished as their time approaches; Adolphe Menjou as the other general in charge is suitably snobbish and upper crust; and MacReady himself as Mireau comes across as one of the most frighteningly rigid by the book bastards in cinema history, lounging back most of the time while he could seemingly care less when these men beg for their lives because it sets a “good example” for the others. Indeed, when the inevitable happens, it left this viewer extremely angry that such an atrocity can be perpetrated on one’s own men, but then unfortunately Kubrick kind of peters the movie out in an unsatisfactory manner, having Douglas do little more than tell off his superiors and then a strange little scene with a beautiful German girl who happens to be a POW singing for a group of French soldiers while Douglas looks on, apparently an attempt to remind us that these men are still human but ultimately not really resolving the story in a way that is very appealing. Overall, while not perfect and not as good as his later masterpieces, a fascinating look at the early work of maybe the greatest filmmaker of all…
8/10