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PATHS OF GLORY “ remains Kubrick's most pitiless, virulent work” (Peter Cowie). A must, especially in this recently struck print, GLORY made Kubrick's reputation, earning him comparisons with the master he most admired, Max Ophuls. The film, based on a novel about the 1917 mass army mutinies, was banned for eighteen years in France, so unsparing was Kubrick's indictment of its military (and of the military mind in general). When authorities forbade Kubrick to shoot GLORY in France, he was forced to make it in Germany. Kirk Douglas plays Dax, a colonel assigned a suicide mission to take “ Ant Hill,” who then defends three innocent privates, court martialled for cowardice in the aftermath of the botched battle. Douglas is very fine as the leader whose honesty and humanism are an affront to the unyielding code of his fellow officers. (Adolphe Menjou and George Macready are the suave hypocrites who sacrifice their soldiers with aristocratic ease.) Celebrated for its icy irony and visual mastery, PATHS OF GLORY coldly diagrams the structures of power with virtuoso camerawork that contrasts the officers' sunlit château with the fetid trenches where the foot soldiers die as fodder. “ The best of all war films . . . to be seen again and again” ( The Listener ). Print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.
PG
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