The paths of glory lead but to the grave

Rating: Null/10 (30 January 2009)

"All Stanley's life he said, 'Never, ever go near power. Don't become friends with anyone who has real power.'" - Christiane Kubrick
"Paths of Glory" begins with the playing of the French nation anthem - an ironic touch - and then quickly introduces us to its key players: Colonel Dax, a well intentioned military man, and General's Broulard and Mireau, two elderly careerists who treat the soldier's under their command with callous indifference.
As the film progresses, director Stanley Kubrick will use two recurring visual motifs - men in trenches and men affixed like mere pawns to a chessboard - to hammer his dour view. The film's soldiers are always trapped, not only constrained by duty, class and national responsibility, but by physical, political and cosmic forces. When they try to rise above or beyond the filth, they're promptly shot down.
Dax, the film's hero, is himself ultimately impotent. All his protests mean nothing. Whether he leads his men to success or failure, they still lose. The end of the film has Dax standing helplessly on the sidelines, watching as his men are executed for failing to take an insignificant Ant Hill. This is WW1 in microcosm, aristocrats, monarchs and burgeoning "democracies" risking lower class limbs for land and hoping desperately to cling onto whatever power is available come the 20th century's new order.
Even as far back as "Paths of Glory", Kubrick's form reflects content. Plot and character coalesce into a very concrete, very formal image of the world. In "Killer's Kiss" and "The Killing" this was strictly a generic world, but "Paths of Glory" launches itself in a different field, that of history, warfare and army politics.
The film's subject is unambiguously visualised in its main setting: a huge château converted to an army command post. Because the decor becomes the story, Kubrick's actual story is not simply told, but barely told. Given a narrative context that is so simple, characters are also defined in very basic ways. The pawns live in the mud, the kings in the ornate château. The kings scapegoat and shift responsibility, the drones take the blame and bullets. Everything else becomes a manifestations of decor or camera movement. Characters are imprisoned, parodied, paired off and squared away. The prime examples are the generals, Broulard and Mireau, lookalikes in uniform, two ruthless men who toy with each another and who lead each other on in the guise of concern for their troops. Luis Bunuel, himself fond of satirising the ruling elite, would adore the film.
Whilst discussing taking the Ant Hill, a series of brief tracks follow our players as they pace marble floors. Each character pursues a different path, but they all arrive at the same end. Broulard proves to spin the more effective web because he is the more clear-sightedly cynical. Mireau in the end becomes a zealot of self-deception. Dax is the liberal-humanitarian shuttlecock passing between them, he has no double but is himself "doubled", negotiating his superiors' ambitions first as a commander on the battlefield then as a lawyer in the courtroom.
Dax, as officer and battlefield soldier, is also a hero of two worlds, the château and the trenches. As "hero", his function is to serve as the meeting point of two perspectives: the objective vista of history and the subjective confusion and terror of trench warfare. Significantly, Dax is Kubrick's only conventional hero outside of "Spartacus" (also starring Douglas). Kubrick's later films would abandon conventional protagonist/antagonist dualities.
Camera movements are clear but subtle. When Mireau inspects the troops in an early scene, Kubrick's camera tracks backwards before him, down an interminable trench. When Dax later tours the trench, the same objective track is inter-cut with one from his point of view as he passes through the ranks. Kubrick's point is clear. Dax sees outward and is aware of, or empathises with, the men around him. Mireau sees inward, fixated on himself and his own goals. Later, he will fire upon his own ants.
This interplay reaches its zenith with the execution of three soldiers. Here the anguished perspectives of the victims, one of whom is played by the always brilliant Timothy Carey, are inter-cut with a tracking shot which itself seems to shift in intensities as it passes in front of a hierarchy of observers: from the indifferent troops to the press corps to Dax and the guilty corporals. Kubrick's extended tracking shots have usually been put down to the influence of Ophuls (to whose death Kubrick dedicates one scene in "Paths of Glory" to), but the articulation of point of view through tracking - an emotional montage - is closer to Hitchcock.
This form of emotional dialectics is present throughout the film. Watch how the generals play number games, tabulating the statistics of probable causalities before battle, bargaining over how many "examples" should be shot, whilst the men below them cry in the trenches and prison houses, vividly aware of their own fickle lives.
Unlike Kubrick's later works, "Glory" is resolutely unambiguous. His dialogue is caustic, blunt and his images likewise, impeccably composed, with stark lines and fluid but muscular tracking shots. Elsewhere, the film is almost robotic, marching towards its climax like a relentless machine. "Glory" was also the first feature to utilise an all percussion sound-track, a fact which lends Kubrick's imagery an even greater sense of foreboding.
10/10 – Masterpiece.