Great

Rating: 9/10 (7 June 2012)

Despite its many virtues, and manifest greatness, Paths Of Glory did not get even a single Academy Award nomination, and was banned from many European film festivals, due to French protests. That the film was released just shortly after David Lean's first epic, The Bridge On The River Kwai, no doubt was part of the reason, for that film- a widescreen Cinemascope blockbuster, in color, from a major studio- is also a great war film, albeit from a wholly different end of the spectrum. Which returns me to my earlier point, that Paths Of Glory is not merely a war film nor an anti-war film. It is both, and revels in such. As French filmmaker Francois Truffaut aptly noted, all war films hold a power that makes calling them anti-war ridiculous. We can not be fully realized human beings without acknowledging that we love war and killing, and war films indulge this, even if they sometimes slip anti-war messages within them. The thrilling shots of Dax leading his men in No Man's Land prove this.
Of course, there are always people and critics who will whiff on even the greatest works of art. Bosley Crowther, the ridiculously bad film critic for the New York Times, wrote:
We feel that Mr. Kubrick--and Mr. Douglas--have made a damaging mistake in playing it in colloquial English, with American accents and attitudes, while studiously making it look as much as possible like a document of the French Army in World War I. The illusion of reality is blown completely whenever anybody talks.
This sort of comment, by Crowther, is akin to those many bad critics make in defense of subtitling over dubbing foreign films. Anyone who is hung up on the American accents of an American made film, wherever it is set, simply is invalidating their worth as a critic of note.
Paths Of Glory is a great film, made by a great director at the start of a career that is nonpareil in American cinema. The Criterion Collection has also don eon eof its best jobs, in recent years, of restoring this classic, and surrounding it with features that are worthy of the art they comment upon. War may be hell, but this release is Kubrickian heaven. If you've never seen the film before, or merely want to see it again, this is the release to engage.