Brilliant, Classic, Unforgettable First World War Drama In The French Trenches

Rating: 8/10 (7 August 2005)

During the trench warfare of 1916, the French 701st Infantry, led by Colonel Dax, are ordered to attack an impregnable key strategic position. The attack is a complete disaster. To punish what they perceive as cowardice within the ranks, the generals in charge order three men to be picked at random and court-martialled.
This was Kubrick's first big-budget film (Douglas helped to finance it) and the first of his truly stunning works. It is an incredible indictment of the suicidal horrors of the First World War, but it tells its story with keen objectivity and meticulous detail. The imagery is unforgettable; the soldiers crawling through the mud, blood and barbed-wire of no-man's-land contrasted with the corpulent generals waltzing in the palatial opulence of their château. Kubrick's camera restlessly prowls the trenches, placing the viewer right in the middle of the action, and circles around the officers as they play their political games with one another. For me, this is Douglas' best performance; Dax is one of the great military heroes in cinema - a quiet, thoughtful man but also a powerful leader, who genuinely cares for his troops but is resigned to the hopelessness of the war. His sense of tragic astonishment as the court arbitrarily passes death-sentences on the scapegoats for a general's failed ambition is the very core of the film's humanity. The rest of the cast are equally fine, particularly the wearisome Meeker and the fuming Macready, and the film is simply brilliant on every technical level. Written by Kubrick, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, from a novel by Humphrey Cobb (the title of which comes from Thomas Gray's poem Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard). The film was banned in France and the German girl who appears in the final scene is Kubrick's wife, Christiane.