The Enemy Is Us

Rating: 10/10 (25 October 2007)

Stanley Kubrick reportedly said "Paths Of Glory" was not anti-war so much as anti-idiocy-in-power. Yet it's hard to tell when the idiocy begins and the war ends, one of many striking impressions left by this singularly striking film.
It is World War I, and French and German armies are stuck in an entrenched stalemate. Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas) is ordered by his overbearing superior Gen. Mireau (George Macready) to take a German high position known as the "Ant Hill". Mireau is eying a promotion, so when Dax's soldiers are pushed back, he takes it personally and orders soldiers under Dax's command executed for cowardice. Dax takes their defense.
There are those who say director Stanley Kubrick had difficulty in his films with brevity and human feelings. I'm one of them. "Paths Of Glory" proves me wrong. It's less than 90 minutes from beginning to end, shorter than some R. Kelly videos, and packed throughout with a kind of raw emotion that tugs at you without slipping into sentiment or hyperbole. This is best displayed in the film's jawdropper of an ending, but always present, whether it's Dax leading his doomed command across No-Man's Land or two soldiers the night before asking each other earnestly if it's better to be shot or blown up.
You never glimpse so much as one German soldier in the entire film, even during the big attack, shot from the side at waist level as if the stricken Frenchmen are going to fall in your lap. The underlying of the movie may be war is hell, but it doesn't help when you are led by those with their own selfish agendas foremost in mind. As Pogo once said around this time: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Douglas is the one star of this film, of course, and in impressive command throughout, whether bucking up his men or bandying words with slick Gen. Broulard (Adolphe Menjou). But Macready is the one who leaves the strongest impression, a character actor memorably parodied in his time by Lenny Bruce as a diabolically fast-talking airplane-glue addict. Clearly nuts at the start, Mireau seems utterly blissful in his ignorant selfishness, proclaiming himself "the only completely innocent man in this whole affair". The shame of it is, compared to Broulard, he is.
"If those little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they'll face French ones," Mireau screams after witnessing the near-decimation of Dax's command. But Broulard knows the men gave their best effort, and backs the executions anyway for "morale".
Great supporting performances, too, by Ralph Meeker, Joe Turkel, and especially Timothy Carey as three condemned soldiers; Wayne Morris as a slippery lieutenant; and Richard Anderson, later Steve Austin's tan boss on "The Six-Million-Dollar Man", as Mireau's unctuous chief of staff, dedicated to seeing the men executed yet showing some understated remorse at the end.
No attempts are made by any of the cast at French accents; the only accents audible here are Brooklynese. Like another screen classic, "Amadeus", this makes the story feel less exotic and more natural to American ears, and hence less easy to dismiss as "other people's problems".
Ultimately this is Kubrick's film, though. In shot after memorable shot, he serves up a classic of economy and raw emotional power, and if you click on the "trivia" feature here, you find he got the girl besides. Kubrick made more celebrated films, but this is his best film ever, one of the best ever made.