Monthly Film Bulletin - Aug 84 - vol 51 no 607 -
by Richard Combs
Paths of Glory
U.S.A.,1957
France, 1916. At a French army command post, General Broulard arrives to inform
General Mireau that headquarters insists on making a breakthrough with an attack
on a heavily fortified German position known as "the Ant Hill". Ordered to carry
out the assault within two days, Mireau protests that it would be a suicidal
impossibility; Broulard's hints of a promotion, however, soon bring him round.
On a morale-boosting tour of the front line, Mireau informs his field commander,
Colonel Dax, of the plan, and bridles at the latter's scepticism. The night
before the attack, the unstable Lieutenant Roget leads a reconnaissance patrol,
kills one of his own men, Lejeune, in a panic, and is threatened with exposure
by Corporal Paris. The assault on the Ant Hill itself, led by Dax, is a
disaster; the second wave of troops is unable even to leave the trenches, and a
furious Mireau orders his own artillery to fire on the men (an order disobeyed
by his artillery officer, Rousseau). Afterwards, Mireau insists on having a
hundred men shot for cowardice as an example. Broulard persuades him to make it
one man from each of the three companies involved, and Dax (a lawyer in
peacetime) is appointed to defend them at the court martial. Three men are
picked: Private Arnaud by lot; Private Ferol as a "social undesirable"; and
Corporal Paris by the vindictive Roget. Prevented from defending them in the
usual way (since the attack was an acknowledged failure, their conviction is a
foregone conclusion), Dax grasps at a straw when Rousseau tells him of Mireau's
order to the artillery. Dax informs Broulard, hoping to blackmail him into
quashing the case. The execution, however, goes ahead (with Arnaud, injured in a
drunken fight with Paris, on a stretcher). Broulard then informs Mireau that
Rousseau's revelations will necessitate an enquiry; the shattered Mireau leaves,
and Dax is offered his command. Rounding on Broulard in disgust, Dax returns to
his troops, whom he observes being entertained in a tavern where a frightened
German girl is forced to sing, first provoking their amusement and derision,
then their tearful sympathy.
What, perhaps, has always made it so tempting to discuss Killer's Kiss and The
Killing in terms of film noir is that their characters so clearly inhabit
nightmare worlds-a nightmare summed up in the noir trademark of chiaroscuro
lighting and balefully 'contained' compositions. But their nightmare might
actually be more a matter of organisation-not the Organisation, but the
diverging, crisscrossing, paralleling and reversing movements of Kubrick's
narrative. Noir may be the cinema's most concrete, recognisable stylistic figure
for the terrors of loss of identity, for protagonists' 'shadow' selves; but
Kubrick may arrive at the same end by different means. Within the toils of his
narrative, his characters are naturalistic figments of city life (Killer's Kiss)
or genre stereotypes locked into their separate corners (The Killing). Where
this is leading, out-side of strictly genre cinema is the ident-ity conundrums
of self-conscious fiction (Lolita). What it passes through, fascinatingly, is
Paths of Glory, where organisational nightmare finds its objective correlative
in the toils of the military mind, and Kubrick, correspondingly promoted from
the tawdry realm of his previous two films to Serious Subject Matter, achieves
his first 'prestige' success.
That objective correlative allows, as it were, both a consolidation and a
relaxation. It freezes the subject of the film in a simple, strong image of
man's dehumanisation by war, and it allows Kubrick to stop tying his plots in
knots in order to make something exceptional out of unexceptional material. Here
madness, death, non-being have, if not a human face, at least a recognisable
institutional one: they are not the threat of being trapped in the endless maze
of a genre plot (though Kubrick found a different way of objectifying that
situation in The Shining). Paths of Glory, to begin with, is one of the most
simply told 'serious' movies in existence; as storytelling it is worlds apart
from Killer's Kiss and The Killing. This is because story has also found its
objective correlative in the harsh military formulation that demands a ritual
sacrifice to explain and expiate a blunder; there is a perverse logicality to
the courtroom trap that is laid for Colonel Dax (he cannot argue the innocence
of his men, since the trial is predicated on their guilt), and this imparts an
external logicality to the narrative. (When he is just telling stories, Kubrick
is one of the least logical directors in existence.) And the harshness in turn
becomes a matter of style. The film cuts so bluntly from the officers scheming
in their chateau to the troops suffering in their trenches that it is hard even
to complain of metaphorical banality. Paths of Glory has an agit-prop
directness.
If this stark linear quality distinguishes it from the previous two films,
however, there remains a basic sameness of design. Kubrick's narrative method is
still his meaning; plot and character still coalesce in a quite concrete image
of the world they inhabit. In Killer's Kiss and The Killing this was strictly a
generic world, which required only that the narrative wheels keep turning
(however aimlessly). Paths of Glory launches itself into a different 'field',
that of history, of mass warfare, of Byzantine army politics - however it is
defined (and a certain ambiguity here is not excluded by the agit-prop quality),
the film's subject is unambiguously visualised in its main setting, the baroque
chateau converted to an army command post, its encrustations (of history, of
military malice) relieving the plot, as it were, of its rococo responsibilities.
Because the decor becomes the story, the actual story is not just simply told,
but barely told. There are certain leaps in plot continuity-the actual choosing
of the three men to be put on trial; the fact that a verdict is never given, the
film simply cutting from the end of the trial to the rehearsing of the firing
squad-which pass by almost unnoticed. In part, they can be put down to the
anti-military irony (the trial is a foregone conclusion), or to Kubrick's
narrative/philosophical determinism. But it can also be said that plot here does
tend to disappear into the woodwork.
Given a narrative context that is so pellucidly simple, characters are also
defined in a rather detached way - as manifestations of decor again, perhaps,
but also of something like camera movement. Characters are imprisoned, parodied,
paired off and squared away by plot in Killer's Kiss and The Killing; in the
broader medium of history in Paths of Glory, they are subject to stranger
gravitational forces. The prime examples are the generals, Broulard and Mireau,
lookalikes in uniform, two ruthless careerists who toy with one another and lead
one another on in the guise of concern for their troops or the war effort. In
their discussion of the taking of the Ant Hill, the film's first scene, a series
of brief tracks follows each man as he paces the marble floor, with each
pursuing a divergent path that will bring them to the same end. Broulard proves
to spin the more effective web because he is the more clear-sightedly cynical;
Mireau in the end becomes a zealot of self-deception. Colonel Dax is the
liberal-humanitarian shuttlecock passing between them; he has no double but is
himself 'doubled', negotiating his superiors' ambitions first as a commander on
the battlefield then as a lawyer (his civilian profession) in the courtroom.
Dax, as officer and battlefield soldier, is also a hero of two worlds, the
chateau and the trenches. In fact, as 'hero', his function is to serve as the
meeting point of two perspectives - the objective vista of history (or military
realpolitik) and the subjective confusion and terror of trench warfare. (In this
he is the precursor, somewhat more 'positive', more sympathetically energised,
of Barry Lyndon, picaresque enigma and eighteenth-century history in the
making.) Again, camera movement is the key: when Mireau inspects the troops in
an early scene, the camera tracks back before him down the interminable trench;
when Dax tours the line on the morning of the Ant Hill assault, the same
objective track is intercut with one from his point of view as he passes through
the ranks. This interplay reaches its apotheosis with the execution of the three
chosen victims. Kubrick films the ritual in extended detail - the parading of
the troops and the long walk of the condemned men (including one semi-conscious
on a stretcher) to the stakes where they will be tied and shot. The inchoate
anguish of one, Private Ferol, weeping on the arm of a priest and asking why he
should have to die rather than one of the other soldiers, is also an 'objective'
truth (he is there as an arbitrary object lesson). The tracking shots from the
point of view of the victims have a particular intensity and 'evolution' as they
pass in front of a hierarchy of observers: from the assembled troops to the
press corps to Dax and the generals. Kubrick's extended tracking shots have
usually been put down to the influence of Ophuls (whose last film, Lola Montes,
was made at the Bavaria studios where Paths of Glory was shot). But the
articulation of point of view through tracking - an emotional montage - is
closer to Hitchcock.
And Paths of Glory, which works so hard to concretise its plot as a sense of
history, of institutionalised inhumanity, also has its anguished emotional
underside, a stark subjectivity. Its principle of montage, of emotional
dialectics, emerges through the game of numbers played by the generals
(tabulating the statistics of probable casualties before the battle; bargaining
over the number of men who should be shot as an example afterwards) and the
vivid awareness of mortality and eternity of the three men waiting to be shot.
In the darkened bunker where they are imprisoned - rather than the trenches,
this is the real underworld of the generals' chateau, with lighting again in a
film noir key though the sense of place is more cosmic - Corporal Paris looks at
a cockroach and muses that by this time tomorrow it will be closer to his wife
than he is. Whereupon Private Ferol's hand comes down with a slap: "Now you got
the edge on him". In terms of performance, Ralph Meeker, Timothy Carey and
Joseph Turkel are more the 'life' of the film than Kirk Douglas who, as
humanity's spokesman, is as historicised, institutionalised, as the generals.
Dax's ambiguous role as the humane officer who must preside over the destruction
of his men is crystallised in a final opposition and evolution of perspective.
Watching his troops dissolve in fellow feeling for a terrified German girl (the
only 'enemy' visible in the film), his expression inscrutably masking the
'universality' of the scene, Dax orders his sergeant, "Give the men a few
minutes more ".
Copyright - The British Film Institute
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