More than an anti-war film.

Rating: 10/10 (3 May 1999)

There are only two film-makers who never made a bad film in their careers:Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick.Even though Kubrick's mastery of the film medium was evident as early as Killers Kiss, and maybe even as early as Day of the Fight, his genius was confirmed by this, his second major feature.Some critics even suggest that Paths Of Glory was Kubrick's BEST film, and that his subsequent career was one of decline. It would be more precise to argue that Paths of Glory was the film which showed Kubricks complete mastery of TRADITIONAL film grammar and techniques, as first' exemplified by Griffith and Pudovkin, while his later films show him EXPERIMENTING with those techniques,challenging established ideas of narration and characterization. In addition, Paths of Glory is-on the surface- a more 'didactic' and "humanistic" film than his later works. He seems to be delivering a conventional "liberal" message; "war is hell', "men should not be inhumane to man',etc.While Kubrick is indeed a liberal humanist who looks askance at the military, his film is not simply a pacifist sermon.Kubrick is, instead offering a close analysis of the meaning of courage , loyalty, and honor. These virtues, so often extolled by 'conservatives' are NOT mocked by Kubrick. Instead he is criticizing the MISUSE of these virtues by "scoundrels' such as the military brass hats.The true hero of paths of glory is NOT the well-meaning but tragically ineffectual liberal 'hero', Colonel Dax (superbly played by Kirk Douglas), instead the hero is a GROUP of people, the ordinary, suffering 'grunts' of the 'poor bloody infantry', who, in the films unforgettable closing scene, hum along with a frightened German girl as she sings a love song in her native language.