Matt Fulton | Writer + Filmmaker

How Kubrick’s Paths of Glory Turns the “Anti-War” Film Inside Out

French filmmaker François Truffaut is quoted as saying, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The widely-accepted interpretation of his comment is that in giving films the “big screen treatment”—portraying epic battle scenes in heroic and graphic detail, framing a story around the camaraderie between soldiers, etc.—the more it glorifies the horror of combat and comes to look more like an Army recruitment advertisement. Setting the true meaning of Truffaut’s comment aside, American cinema of the 1950s was unique for how it mirrored the psyche of the nation at that time and, in many respects, even preyed on its deep-rooted insecurities and fears. Science fiction and horror movies of the decade dramatized otherworldly antagonists and threats born from scientific revolutions of the nuclear age. War movies, likewise, reflected a national mood of exhaustion. An entire generation had returned home victorious from World War II, and the country was embroiled in the Korean War, the first conflict not widely supported by the American public. Working within this context—under the constraints of the Motion Picture Production Code and the conservative sensibilities of audiences—was the 29- year-old director Stanley Kubrick, who in 1957 released Paths of Glory, starring Kirk Douglas and based on the Humphrey Cobb novel of the same name about real events in the French Army during World War I. Paths of Glory is unique for its time because it is “anti-war,” not for focusing on the physical and mental horrors of war, but by providing a sharp commentary on classism and the moral divide between corrupt, high-ranking officers and lowly, frontline soldiers in a way that was fundamentally new to conservative 1950s cinema audiences.

The first half of the film is set in the trenches of World War I and follows Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), a French Army officer, as he executes a suicide mission to storm a fortified German position called the “Anthill” ordered by General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) and General Mireau (George Macready). The attack on the Anthill fails, and General Mireau decides to court-martial several men from Colonel Dax’s unit for cowardice. The remaining two-thirds of the film mostly plays out as a courtroom drama as Dax tries in vain to save his men before their execution. Paths of Glory is a stunningly bleak film for the time, presenting a grim depiction of how high-ranking officers can see their men as little more than cannon fodder, expendable numbers to dispatched without care across a map (or, in this case, no man’s land). Kirk Douglas’s Colonel Dax, comparatively, is portrayed as a morally just “everyman,” a soldier who feels a natural bond with his men but is nonetheless crushed by the overbearing weight of class divide. It is impossible to miss how once could easily see the same problematic divide within the United States Armed Forces deployed to Europe or the Pacific, and it is clear that perhaps the filmmakers used the French Army as little more than a lens to bypass production sensors and conservative, pro-military tastes of American audiences.

The theme of leaders giving crazy commands is explored further in Kubrick’s later films, Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); General Mireau’s order to storm the Anthill is a similar mindset to General Ripper’s (Sterling Hayden) decision to unilaterally trigger Wing Attack Plan R, or Sergeant Hartman’s (R. Lee Ermey) systematic abuse of Private Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio) in basic training. All of these films lack the overt liberalism of traditional anti-war films of their times. The battle scenes are all spectacularly shot and visually horrific, they arguably do glorify violence, but Kubrick—as skilled a storyteller as he was—had so much more to say on the subject than merely, “War is bad and we shouldn’t do it.” Kubrick’s films are not anti-war in the sense that they tell us that war is futile. Instead, and more compellingly, his films are anti-war in the sense that they tell us that war sometimes serves a means to an end, so long as arrogant men do not put their egos ahead of the mission and the inherent value of the men their nations entrusted them to lead.

Works Cited

Kubrick, Stanley, director. Paths of Glory. Performance by Kirk Douglas, United Artists, 1957.

Kubrick, Stanley, director. Dr. Strangelove. Performance by Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, Columbia Pictures, 1964.

Kubrick, Stanley, director. Full Metal Jacket. Performance by Matthew Modine and R. Lee Ermey, Warner Bros, 1987.

Copyright © 2019 Matthew Fulton. All rights reserved.