Kubrick's Searing Indictment of Military Politics Still Startles and Resonates

Rating: 10/10 (5 May 2008)

There have been many exceptional anti-war films throughout the years - Lewis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front", Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H", Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" - but I doubt if there's been one as emotionally devastating and economically dramatized as Stanley Kubrick's searing 1957 classic indictment of military politics among the upper ranks of the French army during WWI. Running a scant 86 minutes, the movie wastes no time in showing the exploitation of military ranks by the French General Staff to participate in a suicide mission on the western front. The objective is to take over "Ant Hill", a German stronghold of no strategic importance to the French except to the ambitious General Mireau, who is given the incentive of a promotion if the attack is successful. It's oblivious from the outset that the chances of success are practically nil since the men in the trenches are battered and weak from a number of successful advancements into enemy territory. The conscientious Colonel Dax is handed the responsibility of leading the men, but it turns completely fatal due initially to the blunder of one commanding officer's orders and the dominant German forces. Desperate to avoid humiliation, Mireau transfers blame for the failure to the soldiers and accuses them of cowardice.
If Mireau had his way, one hundred men would have been publicly executed, but he is ordered to identify three men to be to be executed exemplarily to satisfy the blood thirst of the military command. Dax defends the three men at the court-martial hearing but appears doomed to failure by a kangaroo court. The rest of the story plays out in aching detail until the shattering conclusion. Although he is more famous for his larger-than-life portrayals like Vincent Van Gogh in Vincente Minnelli's "Lust for Life" or the title role in Kubrick's later "Spartacus", Kirk Douglas is no less mesmerizing in a comparatively subdues performance as Dax. In hindsight, it seems rather punitive that he never won a competitive Oscar. In a particularly poignant performance, Ralph Meeker, an even undervalued actor most famous for Robert Aldrich's "Kiss Me Deadly", plays Corporal Paris, one of the three chosen to die specifically because his commanding officer wants to be rid of the only eyewitness to his act of drunken cowardice. With his distinctive facial scar, George Macready plays the fanatical Mireau with uncompromising fury, while Adolphe Menjou, in one of the last roles of a long career, plays the blatantly immoral General Broulard with a slyly sinister panache. It's no wonder the film was banned in France for nearly two decades. The 1999 DVD offers only the original theatrical trailer as an extra. Well beyond Kubrick aficionados, this remains essential viewing for anyone interested in classic cinema.