Paths of Glory Review

Nothing in Kubrick's later work is this direct, and nothing else he made is this short or this hot. The trench tracking shots are the most copied images in war cinema, the camera moving backwards ahead of Kirk Douglas as he walks a line of men who are about to be spent, shellfire cracking behind him, and the effect is not spectacle but arithmetic. The attack on the Ant Hill fails because it was never possible, and a general responds by ordering his own artillery to fire on his own trenches.

The court martial that follows is staged in a chateau with a polished marble floor, and the contrast between that room and the mud is the entire argument. George Macready and Adolph Menjou play careerism as something close to boredom. The moral scheme is simple, generals corrupt and men innocent, with no officer of conscience except the hero, and the closing tavern scene with a captured German girl reaching for open sentiment divides viewers to this day. It stayed effectively unshown in France for eighteen years.