Flawed, but frequently brilliant, Kubrick classic.(spoilers)

Rating: 8/10 (15 August 2001)

'Paths of glory' is considered by many to be a Kubrick masterpiece, especially by those disenchanted with the later works, and their seeming abandoning of humanism. 'Paths' is a very humanist work, not so much an anti-war film as an anti-authoritarian film. It is a timely work, an implicit critique of a 1950s, conformist America ruled by a military hero President. It takes the idea of order - military order as a metonym for social order - and shows how it is paradoxically used to create an Absurdist universe, where a General fires on his own men, where drunken cowards are put in positions of life-determining power, where a man dies not for any logical reason but because he drew lots.
In this way, the film is very much of its cultural time, the post-war world of the existentialists and the Theatre of the Absurd - the closing weeping at a song the soldiers don't understand can be seen as an equivalent to the Nietzchean laugh that closes Sartre's famous short story 'The Wall', a pointless affirmation of a universe where order creates disorder, and man must die, as these men will as they march to the Front in a few moments.

This philosophical underpinning serves to reinforce the critique of Eisenhower's America, the cowing of men into mindless, slobbering beasts at the mercy of their capricious masters; an anti-Semitic world (something the Jewish Kubrick would have been responsive to); a world where the apparatus of law and culture, those great Enlightenment forces of humanism, join forces with the military to validate and conceal the profound subversion, by authority, of natural justice. Visually, this is most powerfully expressed in the obscenely beautiful, symmetrical scene, where Saint-Auban, the army and the mansion behind him, reads out the death sentence.

There are many pointers to the later Kubrick here, in particular the exciting use of cavernous interior space to alienate the individual from himself, his environment, his status, his fate, as well as to visualise a kind of mental deterioration or decadence, in this case the mind of the army, the State, the decadent West. One must admire Kubrick's integrity in a vision of unremitting brutality - he sadistically tantalises us with possibilities of Hollywood-style redemption (the parodic religious symbolism - the mud on the barracks walls like three crosses, the floods of divine light pouring into the cell; the hopes of a deux ex machina when Bax finds about General Mireau's murderous intentions).
With great subtlety, as he would do throughout his career, the camera, supposedly the viewer's guide to the truth, is put in the service of authority, leaving us with the near-impossible task of disentangling what it shows, how it moves (those awesome tracking shots moving at the behest of officers) and what it represents. The scene where the army try to take the anthill, soldiers dying all over the place, literally unable to move, caught by a a freely, relentlessly mobile camera, like the generals urging them on, is an astonishing case in point.
And yet I don't think it's a totally successful Kubrick picture. There are concessions to audience sensibilities - Mireau is punished - too late, but punished; the singing scene, though ultimately pointless, does affirm a humanity in a world Kubrick has shown has very little. The caricatures of the Generals are too easy, if very funny, the case is too one-sided: how can we not sympathise with the innocent victims (although, being men, who must die anyway, they are not really innocent). When Camus wanted to explicate existentialism in 'The Stranger', he chose a murderer. Later Kubrick films would centre on paedophiles, rapists, criminals - it is how we cope with the moral ambiguities they throw up that true argument lies.

Dax shows the possibility of integrity and human decency in such an absurd world. Even here, through, Kubrick's intellect is not static. Like must Kubrick heroes, Dax's unity, his sense of masculine power and capability, is diminished not by his defeat by authority (his speech to Broulard means he remains morally powerful and unified for us), but by his Kubrickan split between his feelings as an individual, and his social (in this case, military) role. When the condemned men walk to their deaths in that amazing scene of death-ritual (like 'Barry Lyndon', super-civilised Western society is underpinned by the most barbaric rites), Colonel Dax's monumental impassivity and his uniform, condemn the men and legitimise their death. As Ionesco warns 'Arithmetic leads to Philology and Philology leads to Crime'.