Real greatness

Rating: 9/10 (14 February 2008)

Stanley Kubrick, like playwright Arthur Miller is one of that elite band of artists whose works rise above country and time to become universal and timeless.
Unsurprisingly the movie was banned for many years in France but in reality it could have been set in almost any country - and that country would have most likely either banned it officially - or, as almost amounts to the same thing, not distributed it. France was perhaps simply a convenient other country on which to hook a universal story. Unfortunately many of the audience may have seen it as an expose of the French Army - and for that matter the French more generally.
Yet is it anti-war? Certainly not directly. It said little or nothing about the massive casualties - it concerns the fate of just three men. Does it say no war is worth fighting? It is in truth completely silent on that. What then does it say? I think that it says that over and beyond killing and suffering, war leads to another kind of inhumanity - when those ordering others to die may be persuaded against their conscience to do so for the basest of personal reasons. In fact the motives of the high command in the movie seem purer - they simply wanted the elusive "breakthrough" and made the judgement that the cost in soldier's lives was in that immortal phrase "a price worth paying".
The clincher for greatness and perhaps the real message was the scene where French soldiers are reduced to tears while listening to the shy pretty German waitress singing homely German songs. Few of the soldiers would have understood the language - although all instinctively understood what underlay it: the softer side of common humanity without borders or flags. Their tears one supposes come from their recognising that fact - and that they have been killing and are being killed because of something that has no place for that common humanity.