While latecomers to the Stanley Kubrick cult were preparing to celebrate HAL`s birthday last Sunday, I was privately saluting a far more auspicious milestone in the director`s career: the 35th anniversary of ”Paths of Glory.”
Though overpowered by such later, bigger, flashier movies as ”2001: A Space Odyssey” (in which HAL the computer appeared), ”Dr. Strangelove” and ”A Clockwork Orange,” ”Paths of Glory” remains for me Kubrick`s masterwork.
Watching a videocassette on New Year`s Day only reinforced my conviction. Unlike so many revered films of the `50s (or `40s or `60s), ”Paths of Glory” hasn`t been appreciably diminished by time, technology or the transfer to videotape.
While its impact can`t help but be blunted (slightly) by the small screen, ”Paths of Glory” is, in my immodest estimation, not only Kubrick`s most visually and dramatically accomplished but the most devastating of all movies that frontally assault the military bureaucrazy.
Only 29 when ”Paths of Glory” was released, Kubrick had one mainstream film to his credit, ”The Killing,” a brisk, stylish but derivative heist movie. However well-assembled, it offered little in the way of preparation for ”Paths of Glory.” Watching ”Paths of Glory” on the big screen in 1957, I found it as audacious and startling as ”Citizen Kane,” which had been re- released to theaters a year earlier.
Derived from Humphrey Cobb`s 1935 novel, ”Paths of Glory” was reportedly based on a mutinous incident in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I. The film almost immediately plunges the viewer into a French regiment`s suicidal attack on the German ”Ant Hill,” an attack ordered by venal generals (Adolphe Menjou and George Macready) more for political and personal than for military reasons.
When the attack invariably fails, Kirk Douglas, the regimental commander, is forced to defend three soldiers, who have been randomly chosen as scapegoats from each company and court-martialed for cowardice. Military injustice is swiftly and brutally dispensed. Kubrick`s moviemaking is equally swift and brutal, as when he cuts from Douglas` closing pleas for mercy to a scene that shows the firing squad preparing to execute the three men.
Even on videotape, I was able to re-experience the emotional power of
”Paths of Glory,” which, it becomes clearer with each viewing, depends to a great extent on Kubrick`s virtuosic camerawork.
Photographed in a style that combines newsreel immediacy with noir elegance, it forces the viewer to become a participant, alternating between relentless tracking shots in the smoky, claustrophobic trenches and the circular, spacious visuals in the chateau that is the generals` command post. The scenes in which Douglas confronts Menjou and Macready, all sly grimaces and baleful glances, must rank among the most gracefully
choreographed of any Kubrick film, with his serpentine camera following them around the baroque chauteau as they execute their pas de trois, a dance of death that ominously foreshadows a century of even greater slaughter.
While the visuals may be flawless, there are wrinkles in the script and direction, however minor. Kubrick`s irony often has all the subtlety of a howitzer.
After ”Paths of Glory,” his anti-militarism inevitably led him to the apocalyptic burlesque of ”Dr. Strangelove” and the phantasmagoria of ”Full Metal Jacket.”
In its sardonic and unremitting assault on the military mind, ”Paths of Glory” was both behind and ahead of its time, caught in a no man`s land between `50s complacency and Cold War anxiety. Though seen by some as a pacifistic landmark, it was generally rejected by critics and audiences. Time magazine`s kissoff was typical, praising the filmmaking but dismissing its anti-military posture as a ”passion out of fashion.”
It seems just as unfashionable in the Bush era. Not that an excuse is needed, but ”Paths of Glory” can be watched to commemorate another anniversary: the war in the Persian Gulf, which began a year ago Thursday. As much as anything else, Kubrick`s movie is a reminder that war is not all victory parades, jubilant politicians and yellow ribbons. Whether in 1916 or 1992, ”the paths of glory,” as Thomas Gray put it, ”lead but to the grave.”
