The Great Movies III

Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) closes with a scene that doesn't seem organic to the movie. We've seen harrowing battlefield carnage, a morally rotten court-martial, French army generals corrupt and cynical beyond all imagining, and now what do we see? Drunken soldiers, crowded into a bistro, banging their beer steins on the tables as the owner brings a frightened German girl onstage. He makes lascivious remarks about her figure and cruel ones about her lack of talent, but she has been captured and must be forced to perform. Hoots and whistles arise from the crowd. The frightened girl begins to sing. The noise from the crowd dies away. Her tremulous voice fills the room. She sings "The Faithful Hussar." A hush falls, and some of the soldiers begin to hum the notes; they know the song but not the words.

If the singing of "La Marseillaise" in a bar in Casablanca was a call to patriotism, this scene is an argument against it. It creates a moment of quiet and tenderness in the daily horror these soldiers occupy-a world in which generals casually estimated that 55 percent of these very men might be killed in a stupid attack and found that acceptable.

Songs at the ends of dramas usually make us feel better. They are part of closure. This song at the end of this movie makes us feel more for lorn. It is not a release, but a twist of Kubrick's emotional knife. When Truffaut famously said that it was impossible to make an antiwar movie, because action argues in favor of itself, he could not have been thinking of Paths of Glory, and no wonder: because of its harsh portrait of the French army, the film was banned in France until 1975.

The film, made in 1957, is typical of Kubrick's earlier work in being short (eighty-four minutes), tight, told with an economy approaching terseness. Later his films would expand in length and epic scope, sometimes to their advantage, sometimes not. It does however contain examples of one of his favorite visual strategies, the extended camera movement that unfolds to reveal details of a set or location, and continues long after we expect it to be over.

Early in the film, the camera precedes its hero, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), on an inspection tour of a muddy fortified trench that goes on and on and on. Later the camera follows doomed men into No Man's Land, tracking alongside them through mud and shell blasts, trenches and craters, past bodies that drop before our eyes. Still later, there is a dolly shot through a formal ball to find a French general. And toward the end, an elaborate military parade for a firing squad, with the camera preceding three condemned men as they walk and walk and walk toward their deaths.

These shots of long duration impress the importance of their subjects upon us: the permanence of trench warfare, the devastation of attack, the hypocrisy of the ruling class, the dread of the condemned men. If some of Kubrick's later extended shots, including the endless tracking shot down long hotel corridors in The Shining (1979), seem like exercises in style, the shots in Paths of Glory are aimed straight at our emotions.

The story is simply summarized. French and German armies face each other along five hundred miles of fortified trenches. Both sides have been dug in for two years. Any attempt at an advance brings a dreadful human cost in lives. The effete little General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) orders his subordinate, General Mireau (George Macready), to take an impregnable German position, "The Anthill," by, incredibly, the day after tomorrow. Mireau argues that it cannot be done. Broulard thinks perhaps it can be accomplished with no more than 55 percent casualties. He hints that there is a promotion and a third star for the general who does it. The two-star General Mireau goes through the motions of protest: "The lives of eight thousand men! What is my ambition against that? My reputation?" And then: "But, by god, we might just do it!"

Colonel Dax must lead the charge. He knows it is doomed, and he protests, but he follows orders. In a scene set the night before the raid, a scene that in other language might have been conceived by Shakespeare, two of his men debate the merits of dying by machinegun or bayonet. One chooses the machinegun, because it is quick; while the bayonet might not kill, it would hurt. The other says that proves he is more afraid of pain than death.

The actual assault has a realism that is convincing even now that we have seen Stone's Platoon and Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The blackand-white photography is the correct choice; this is a world of shapes and shadows, mud and smoke, not a world for color. The loss of life is devastating. The advance is halted. Watching from the safety of the trenches, General Mireau decides the men are cowards and orders French artillery to fire on their own men, to drive them forward. The battery commander refuses to act without a written order.