Paths of Glory
Paths of Glory is a 1957 American anti-war film directed by Stanley Kubrick, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson. It is adapted from the 1935 novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb, which in turn was based on the Souain corporals affair during World War I. The film stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refuse to continue a suicidal attack, after which Dax defends them against charges of cowardice in a court-martial. It also features Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready, Timothy Carey, Joe Turkel, Wayne Morris and Richard Anderson.
The film was co-produced through Douglas' film production company, Bryna Productions, and a joint venture between Stanley Kubrick and James B. Harris, Harris-Kubrick Pictures. Due to the film's negative depiction of the French military, it could not be filmed there, and was instead shot in West Germany. It was likewise not released in France until 1972.
Paths of Glory was released by United Artists on December 20, 1957. It received critical acclaim and several international accolades, including a BAFTA Award nomination for Best Film, and is considered one of the greatest war films ever made. In 1992, the film was deemed "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Plot
In 1916, during World War I in Northern France, French Major General Georges Broulard orders his subordinate, Brigadier General Paul Mireau, to take "the Anthill", a well-defended German position. Mireau refuses, citing the impossibility of success. When Broulard mentions a potential promotion, Mireau convinces himself the attack will succeed. In the trenches, Mireau throws a private out of the regiment for showing signs of shell shock. Mireau leaves the planning of the attack to Colonel Dax, despite Dax's protests.Before the attack, drunken Lieutenant Roget leads a night-time scouting mission, sending one of his two men ahead. Overcome by fear while waiting for the man's return, Roget lobs a grenade, accidentally killing the scout. Corporal Paris, the surviving scout, confronts Roget, who denies wrongdoing and falsifies his report to Colonel Dax.
The daylight attack on the Anthill is a failure. Dax leads the first wave of soldiers into no man's land under heavy rifle and machine gun fire but none of them reach the German trenches and the follow up waves refuse to attack. Mireau orders his artillery to fire on them to force them onto the battlefield. The artillery commander refuses without written confirmation of the order.
To deflect blame for the attack's failure, Mireau decides to court-martial a hundred soldiers for cowardice. Broulard orders Mireau to reduce the number and Mireau asks each company in the attacking wave to select one man. Roget picks Corporal Paris to keep him from testifying about the scouting mission. Private Ferol is deemed a "social undesirable" by his commander. Private Arnaud is chosen at random by lots, despite being decorated twice for heroism.
Dax, a criminal defense lawyer in civilian life, volunteers to defend the men at their court-martial. The trial, however, is a farce. There is no formal written indictment, a court stenographer is not present, and the court refuses to admit evidence that would support acquittal. In his closing statement, Dax angrily denounces the proceedings. Dax later informs Broulard that Mireau had ordered their artillery to fire onto French soldiers. Despite Dax's efforts to save his men, the sentence of death is confirmed and the condemned men are eventually shot by firing squad.
Following the executions, Broulard tells Mireau that he will be investigated for shelling his own men. Mireau denounces this as a betrayal by his commanding officer. Broulard offers Mireau's vacant command to Dax, assuming Dax's attempts to stop the executions were a ploy to gain Mireau's job. Disgusted at the suggestion his efforts were merely a ploy to get promoted, Dax lashes out at Broulard. Discovering Dax was sincere, Broulard rebukes him for his idealism, and Dax in turn denounces Broulard's nihilism.
Shortly afterwards, Dax notices some of his soldiers carousing loudly at an inn and jeering at a captive German girl, but grow more subdued as she sings a sentimental German folk song, The Faithful Hussar. Dax is informed by Boulanger that they have new orders to return to the trenches immediately, but Dax instead allows the men to stay in the bar for a while longer before returning to his office.
Cast
Production
Background
The title of Cobb's novel came from the ninth stanza of Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard".The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th'inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
The book was a minor success when published in 1935, retelling the true-life affair of four French soldiers who were executed to set an example to the rest of the troops. The novel was adapted to the stage the same year by Sidney Howard, World War I veteran and scriptwriter of Gone with the Wind. The play was a flop on Broadway because of its harsh anti-war scenes that alienated the audience. Nonetheless, Howard continued to believe in the relevance of the subject matter and thought it should be made into a film, writing, "It seems to me that our motion picture industry must feel something of a sacred obligation to make the picture." Fulfilling Howard's "sacred obligation", Stanley Kubrick decided to adapt it to the screen after he remembered reading the book when he was younger. Kubrick and his partners purchased the film rights from Cobb's widow for $10,000.
Gray's stanza reflects Kubrick's feelings about war as well, and that becomes clear in the narrative of the film – a long battle for something with such an unimportant name as the "Ant Hill". Some of Kubrick's unrealized projects contained themes of war as well. Kubrick once told a New York Times journalist;
Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved – that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.
Paths of Glory is based loosely on the true story of the Souain corporals affair when four French soldiers were executed in 1915 during World War I under General Géraud Réveilhac for failure to follow orders. The soldiers were exonerated posthumously in 1934. The novel is about the French execution of innocent men to strengthen others' resolve to fight. The French Army did carry out military executions for cowardice, as did most of the other major participants, excluding the United States of America and Australia. The United States sentenced 24 soldiers to death for cowardice, but the sentences were never carried out. However, a significant point in the film is the practice of selecting individuals at random and executing them as a punishment for the sins of the whole group. This is similar to the Roman practice of decimation, which was rarely used by the French Army in World War I.
Development
Kubrick said of his decision to make a war film: "One of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual or our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation. Further, war acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings. Attitudes crystallise and come out into the open. Conflict is natural, when it would in a less critical situation have to be introduced almost as a contrivance, and would thus appear forced or, even worse, false."Although Kubrick's previous film The Killing had failed at the box office, it had managed to land on several critical top-ten lists for the year. Dore Schary, then head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, liked the film and hired Kubrick and Harris to develop film stories from MGM's pile of scripts and purchased novels. Finding nothing they liked, Kubrick remembered reading Cobb's book at the age of 14 and the "great impact" it had upon him and suggested it as their next project. Schary strongly doubted the commercial success of the story, which had already been turned down by every other major studio.
After Schary was fired by MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris managed to interest Kirk Douglas in a script version that Kubrick had done with Calder Willingham. After reading the script, Kirk Douglas was impressed and managed to get an advance for a $1 million budget from United Artists to help produce the film. Of the roughly $1 million budget, more than a third was allocated to Kirk Douglas' salary. Prior to the involvement of Douglas and his Bryna Production Company, no studio had shown interest in the seemingly noncommercial subject matter and filming in black and white. MGM rejected the idea of the film based on fears that the film would be unfavourable to European distributors and audiences. United Artists agreed to back it with Douglas as the star.
Writing
Kubrick eventually hired Calder Willingham to work on the script of Paths of Glory, of which Jim Thompson had written earlier drafts. The specific contributions by Kubrick, Thompson, and Willingham to the final script were disputed, and the matter went to arbitration with the Writers' Guild. Willingham claimed that Thompson had minimal involvement in the final script of the film, claiming responsibility for 99 percent of Paths of Glory for himself and that Thompson had not written any of the dialogue. When Thompson's draft screenplay was compared to the final film, it was clear that Thompson had written seven scenes, including the reconnaissance mission and the scene with soldiers the night before their executions by firing squad. In the end, the Writers' Guild attributed the script in the order of Kubrick, Willingham and then Thompson.Parts of the screenplay were taken from Cobb's work verbatim. However, Kubrick made several changes to the narrative of the novel in his adaptation, most notably his shift of focus to Colonel Dax, as opposed to Paris, Ferol and Arnaud as in the novel. One speculated addition is when General Mireau says "show me a patriot, and I'll show you an honest man", and Colonel Dax responds that Samuel Johnson once said: "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel".
Primarily, Kubrick and Thompson had added a happy ending to the film to make the film more commercial to the general public, where the men's lives are saved from execution at the last minute by the general. However, these changes were reversed back more closely to the original novel at the demand of Kirk Douglas. It led to a first major argument between director and star, who thought Kubrick had been rewriting the script behind his back: "I called Stanley to my room... I hit the ceiling. I called him every four-letter word I could think of... 'I got the money, based on that script. Not this shit!' I threw the script across the room. 'We're going back to the original script, or we're not making the picture.' Stanley never blinked an eye. We shot the original script. I think the movie is a classic, one of the most important pictures—possibly the most important picture—Stanley Kubrick has ever made." On the Criterion Collection Blu-ray, James B. Harris claims to have gotten this ending past distributors by sending the entire script instead of just the reversed ending, in the knowledge that those distributors would not read through the whole script again. After viewing the film, United Artists was happy with the changes and left the ending as it is.