Film

Paths of Glory

Name: Paths of Glory
Genre: War, Drama
Released: 1957
Cast: Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready, Wayne Morris

Kubrick's coldly furious anti-war film follows Colonel Dax as he defends three soldiers scapegoated for a suicidal attack their own general ordered. Half courtroom drama, half trench nightmare, shot in stark black-and-white with tracking shots that turn dugouts into cages. Eighty-eight minutes, no wasted motion, and an ending that refuses every easy comfort — built for anyone who wants a war film that indicts the men giving orders, not just the ones obeying them.

TMDb rating

8.3

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The trench experience Kubrick's camera only glimpses, told from the private's side rather than the colonel's. One of the first war films to refuse any comfort about glory or purpose.

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Kubrick's own return to the machine that grinds soldiers down, thirty years later and far more corrosive. Watching how his eye for institutional cruelty sharpened is its own reward.

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They Shall Not Grow Old2018

Paths of Glory dramatises a war Kubrick never saw; this is the actual men, the actual mud, restored so vividly it closes the gap between the fiction and the fact.

Peter Jackson restored and colourised real WWI footage until the soldiers look like they're standing in front of you, breathing. It's the trench Kubrick staged, except nobody staged it.

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Same war, same disgust at its waste, but seen from the mud rather than the chateau — the view Colonel Dax is fighting to protect, filmed by men who had actually lived it.

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