Paths of Glory
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Short description
Paths of Glory is set on the Western Front in 1916, during the First World War. A French corps commander orders an ambitious divisional general to take a heavily fortified German position. The assault fails, and when the exhausted soldiers of the regiment fall back, the high command decides to make an example of them. Colonel Dax, who led the attack and had recognised the order as hopeless, defends three arbitrarily chosen men at their court-martial for cowardice.
Stanley Kubrick directed and co-wrote the screenplay with Jim Thompson and Calder Willingham. The film is the fourth of the thirteen features he directed, arriving between The Killing and Spartacus. Kirk Douglas, who also produced alongside James B. Harris, plays Colonel Dax; Adolphe Menjou and George Macready appear as Generals Broulard and Mireau, with Ralph Meeker, Wayne Morris and Richard Anderson among a credited cast of twenty-five.
Made in the United Kingdom and the United States by United Artists, Bryna Productions, Harris-Kubrick Productions and Franco London Films, the film runs 88 minutes and took about a million dollars worldwide at the box office. Audiences hold it in high regard: it scores 8.4 on IMDb from over 208,000 votes and 8.3 on TMDB. A critics' rating of 9.1 from 78 reviews places it slightly above those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- In 1992, the film was added to the National Film Registry as a historically significant film.
- Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected Kubrick's project, after which the film script came to Kirk Douglas. He stated that he was ready to play the main role and would undertake to persuade United Artists to finance and distribute the film on the condition that Harris and Kubrick cede production of the film to Douglas's company, Bryna Productions, and that Kubrick would film five more films with Bryna Productions, starring Douglas in two of them.
- The film is based on the novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb.
- "Paths of Glory" did not align with the official position of the French and Belgian authorities, who sought to avoid publicizing the shameful pages of World War I. The film was withdrawn from release in these countries. West Germany joined the boycott to avoid damaging relations with the French, and Spain – due to the rejection of pacifist ideas by Franco's militaristic regime. These bans were not lifted until the late 1970s.
- In this film, Kubrick first employed one of his favorite techniques: seemingly endless camera movement, which reveals ever more details. It is in this manner that the camera meanders through the trenches for almost 10 minutes, for which the trenches had to be made one-third wider than reality to allow the film crew to move freely (180 cm instead of 120 cm).
- The film gained true recognition and relevance only with the start of the Vietnam War. Throughout the 1960s, it became known as perhaps the best anti-war film (an opinion shared by, among others, Steven Spielberg), and Kirk Douglas as early as the 1960s began to call the role of Colonel Dax the best in his acting career.
- The film was shot in the vicinity of Schleißheim Palace near Munich.
- Kubrick conceived the idea for the film during his collaboration with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the mid-1950s, when he suggested to James B. Harris that they adapt a book he had found in his father's library as a teenager—Humphrey Cobb's 'Paths of Glory' (1935). The book was based on real events related to the execution of several soldiers from the regiment of General Jean Reynaud in Soissons, similar to the ancient Roman practice of decimation. Cobb was inspired to write the story by an article published in the New York Times in 1934, which reported that a French court had ordered the payment of compensation to the widows of two surviving soldiers, amounting to approximately seven cents each.
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