Conflict and controversy > Changing views
Source 3
Extracts from a website review of the film ‘Paths of Glory’, which was originally shown
in 1957
(www.filmsite.org, review by Tim Dirks)
How to use this source:
Study this source carefully and see what it tells you about views on the war at the time it was
written. As you study the source, ask yourself:
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z
z
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When was this film produced?
What is the attitude of this film towards the Great War commanders?
How and why was it controversial?
Which of sources 1, 2, 4 or 5 is it most similar to?
Will you choose this as one of the sources to use in your report?
http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/greatwar/
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Conflict and controversy > Changing views
Source 3
Paths of Glory (1957) is a masterful, unsentimental, classic anti-war film about World War I. It
was 28 year-old Stanley Kubrick's fourth feature-length film…
Juxtaposed in interesting fashion, this low-budget, independent production with a distinctly
European flavor premiered one week after the release of David Lean's Best Picture-winning,
CinemaScopic war epic blockbuster, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) from Columbia
Pictures. This stark, slightly stagey, 87-minute black and white film, shot on location in
Germany with crisp B/W photography (by George Krause) with a budget less than $1 million, is
as compelling and harsh an indictment and criticism of war as Lewis Milestone's award-winning, anti-war classic All Quiet On The Western Front (1930), adapted from Erich Maria
Remarque's novel.
The title of the film, actually ironic and inappropriate since war is not a 'path of glory', was suggested by line 36 in 18th century English romantic poet Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
Although the film is considered one of Kubrick's best, it was denied even a single Academy
Award nomination.
The suicidal attack on an impregnable fortress named 'Ant Hill' in the film (against an unseen
German enemy) was inspired by and loosely based upon the six-month bloodbath in 1916 during the Battle of Verdun for Fort Douamont, a French stronghold eventually captured by the
Germans. (The same battle was frequently referred to in Renoir's The Grand Illusion (1937)).
The protracted conflict claimed the lives of 315,000 French soldiers (called poilus) on the
Western front. Due to the film's raw, controversially-offensive and critical assessment of hypocritical French military and bureaucratic authorities who callously condemn and sacrifice three
randomly-chosen innocent men with execution (for cowardice) for their own fatal blunder, it suffered poor box-office returns, and was banned in France and Switzerland for almost twenty
years (until the mid-1970s) following its release.
One of the film's posters exclaimed: "IT EXPLODES IN THE NO-MAN'S LAND NO PICTURE
EVER DARED CROSS BEFORE!" It also describes the film as a "bombshell story of a Colonel
who led his regiment into hell and back - while their maddened General waited for them - with
a firing squad." Major star Kirk Douglas … played the lead role as lawyer-trained Colonel Dax
compelled to defend three of his court-martialed men against hopeless odds. …
Based upon the controversial, published, semi-fictional 1935 novel of the same name by
Humphrey Cobb, this anti-war film emphasizes the wide, hierarchical gap between those who
take orders and fight the wars in muddy trenches, and those that give the orders and are isolated from the real ravages of war. Three blameless, subordinate soldiers are victimized, given
hopeless 'paths of glory,' and condemned to die to cover up the wrong-headed actions of their
ruthless and opportunistic superiors. …
[To read the full review and summary of the film, go to: http://www.filmsite.org/path.html]
http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/greatwar/
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