Paths of Glory

Stanley Kubrick spends the first act of Paths of Glory building an argument with a dolly and a wide lens, and it is finished, more or less, before the court-martial that gives the film its plot even convenes.

The tracking shots through the trenches — Kirk Douglas’s Colonel Dax walking the line, men flattened against the walls, the camera moving laterally at a fixed, almost clinical distance — do something dialogue cannot. They give you scale and confinement at once. You see how little room there is to manoeuvre, literally and otherwise, before anyone in a chateau has said a word about honour or discipline. By the time the generals start talking about morale over good wine and better furniture, the film has already shown you what morale costs at ground level. The contrast between the mud-level tracking shots and the composed, symmetrical framing of the château interiors is not subtle, and it is not meant to be.

The argument in the frame

This is why the courtroom scenes that follow work as well as they do. A lesser version of this film would need the trial to do all the moral labour — the impassioned speech, the reveal of injustice. Kubrick has already spent that capital. The trench sequences establish the terrain of the argument: distance from command, indifference dressed as strategy, men treated as line items. What happens in the makeshift courtroom afterwards plays almost as formality, because we already know, in our bodies, what the verdict is going to cost.

It is worth saying plainly: this is not a war film in the sense of combat as its centre of gravity. The attack sequence exists, and it is brutal and disorienting in exactly the right way, but the picture’s real interest is in what happens to men after the shooting, when the institution decides someone must answer for failure. That makes it a companion piece to the trial dramas of other eras more than to most trench-warfare pictures.

Where it strains

The reservation is this: the generals are drawn with very little interior life. Adolphe Menjou and George Macready play command as near-total cynicism, articulate and unbothered, and while that serves the film’s clarity, it flattens the case somewhat. Real institutional failure is usually more evasive than villainous — people convincing themselves they are being reasonable. Kubrick, still in his twenties when he made this, prefers the sharper line. It is a defensible choice for a film this economical, at eighty-eight minutes, but it means Paths of Glory argues its point with force rather than nuance.

That is also, honestly, why it holds up. It is for anyone who wants the case against military justice made with total visual conviction rather than a debate. It is not the film for viewers wanting ambiguity in their villains. As a study of how a camera can prosecute an argument before the script does, though, it has few equals.