PATHS of GLORY (U.S., 1957, 87 Minutes) “The Paths of Glory Lead

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PATHS OF GLORY (U.S., 1957, 87 Minutes) “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” (Thomas Grey, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, 1751) After 28 year old Stanley Kubrick directed the film version of Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 semi-fictional novel in 1957, he was asked why he had produced an anti-war film at the patriotic height of the Cold War. Kubrick reportedly replied that he had not made an anti-war film but rather a political one about authoritarian ignorance. Both the film and the novel are not so much anti-war and pacifistic as they are critiques of the bureaucratic apparatus organized to conduct modern warfare. As is currently being described in OLLI course F304, by 1915 the Great War in the West reached a bloody stalemate. The German Army, with minimal ground holding forces and skillful deployment of men and guns, repulsed every Allied attempt to drive it from France and Belgium in battles at Ypres, Arras, the Argonne Forest, and in Champagne. French losses alone reached a staggering 1,000, 000 fatalities. Against this backdrop (and with portents of Verdun to come), Paths of Glory presents the story of common French infantrymen caught in the web of military gamesmanship and blind ambition in command. The film emphasizes the gap between those who receive orders in the trenches and their self-serving, ruthless and opportunistic commanders in the rear. Focusing on the chain of command, the film targets the army as an institution which seems to lurch from one murderous horror to the next, guided by the ambitions and vanities of the moment. After a suicidal attack on an impregnable German position fails (allusion to Ft. Douamont at Verdun?), the generals attempt to cover their errors by -2- cynically court-martialing three common soldiers for cowardice in the face of the (unseen) enemy. Kirk Douglas, who financed the film and persuaded United Artists to make it, stars as the regimental commander who leads the doomed charge and the defense counsel for the accused. After the unforgettable climax, a final extraordinary scene (not in Cobb’s novel) depicts the faces of those who must endure in the trenches to the end..

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TCM BREAKFAST CLUB SCREENING Paths of Glory I 1957 Directed by Stanley Kubrick The precocious talent of Stanley Kubrick had already come to public attention when, still in his late 20s, he made Paths of Glory in 1957. A year earlier he revealed his extraordinary gifts as both storyteller and motion picture craftsman with the noir-influenced crime thriller The Killing. Bleak and sombre, Paths of Glory was released when America was not, for once, embroiled in military conflict. While World War II had ended twelve years earlier and Korea’s ceasefire was into its fifth year, their legacy was still an agonising issue for thousands of bereaved families and injured ex-service personnel, not to mention the increasingly idealistic generation of young Americans whom John F Kennedy would find so receptive to his political creed three years later. Paths of Glory, with its powerful anti-war message, would therefore have struck a chord with many, says TCM writer David Humphrey Kubrick adapted Paths of Glory from Humphrey Cobb’s 1935 ambitious General Mireau (George Macready) orders a regiment novel, whose title Cobbs had cribbed from a line in Thomas on a suicidal mission to take a hill thinking it will enhance his Gray’s famous poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: chances of promotion. He leaves the planning to a disbelieving Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who can see the operation is The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r, doomed. And so it proves - the mission is a complete failure. And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, None of the French troops reaches the German stronghold, with Awaits alike th'inevitable hour.
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