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.
<blockquote><poem>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.</poem></blockquote>
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. 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;
<blockquote>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.</blockquote>
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.
Writing
Kubrick eventually hired Calder Willingham to work on the script of Paths of Glory (1957), 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 [original] 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."
Filming
thumb|244x244px|Kubrick on the set of Paths of Glory (1957 publicity photo)
Production took place entirely in Bavaria, Germany, especially at the Schleissheim Palace near Munich. Timothy Carey was fired during production. He was reportedly extremely difficult to work with, even to the extent of faking his own kidnapping, holding up the whole production. He was replaced in the scenes remaining to be shot with a double. The film cost slightly less than $1 million and just about broke even.
Due to having three years' military training, around 600 German police officers were used as extras for soldiers. The last scenes filmed were those that take place on the battlefield. For the construction of the battlefield, Kubrick hired 5,000 square yards (0.4 hectares) of land from a local farmer. It was on set that they originally had met.
Kubrick's vision of war was far bleaker than that of some other films of the era, which also influenced the director's choice to shoot the picture in black and white. The visuals also allow the audience to see the difference between "life in the trenches" and "life in the command". From the opulent mansion of the high-ranking officers, the audience notices wide shots from the exterior and the interior. The viewer misses nothing; every decadent piece of furniture, jewelry or bauble that the senior officers have, in sharp contrast to the trenches where the shots are much tighter. Close ups and point-of-view shots (e.g. from Colonel Dax's perspective) are cramped and tight, suffocating for the audience. Switching to a shot in front of Dax's person, e.g. a walking shot, the audience becomes much like the other soldiers accompanying him in the trenches, feeling stuck and trapped in the confined and dangerous space.
Sound design
The musical score by Gerald Fried makes extensive use of percussion instruments, specifically military drums.
Kubrick used sound, or the lack thereof, to build tension and suspense in the film, particularly towards the beginning when the three soldiers are given orders to check on the Anthill. This scene is in silence, with no use of diegetic/non-diegetic sound, working well to add depth and rawness. Much of what the viewer can hear throughout the film is explosions in the distance and the sound of a whistle being blown, further adding to the overall documentary style of the film. The lack of a big bold score gives no suggestion of heroism to the plot of the film, and the sounds of people dying are a common trope associated with Stanley Kubrick's films. The song towards the ending happens within the narrative. In the tavern with the French soldiers of Dax's regiment, a young woman sings a traditional German folk song of that era, "Der treue Husar". With Kubrick's use of mise-en-scene, the audience is able to see the German woman's performance bring the men to tears through various close-ups and angles. The troopers begin to hum and eventually sing along to the tune in an expression of their basic humanity. Paths of Glory later ends in the same way it began with the familiar snare/drum roll used in the opening, indicative of a lack of change throughout the film. Kubrick's use of sounds and song functions as a kind of narration for the audience, linking each sound to a later or earlier scene in the film.
Release
The film had its "world premiere" in Munich, Germany, on November 1, 1957. A month and a half before that event, on September 18, a special screening of Kubrick's production was also presented in Munich, but then to a very select audience. Frank Gordon, reporting from the Bavarian capital for the widely read New York trade paper Variety, describes the earlier presentation in the paper's September 27 issue: