Kubrick Beats Gloriful Path to Brattle

"Troops are like children...they crave discipline. The way to preserve discipline is to shoot a man every now and then."

Welcome to the well-worn, WWI world of Stanley Kubrick's Paths to Glory.

You've seen this type of wartime melodrama too many times before. The officers are all cannibalistic monsters, the bedraggled rank and file scream cannon fodder, and the black and white cinematography, far from a stark, chilling revelation of the nightmare that is war, is predictable and bland.

Kirk Douglas plays a French colonel who must stand as defense counsel for three of his men after they are made scapegoats for a French military defeat. He's up against a snooty general (George MacReady) worried about preserving his good name, a prosecuting attorney (Richard Anderson) who actually raises a pointed finger to the heavens and shouts. "Find the accused guilty!" and a cast of sycophantic French civil servants. Douglas and most of the other actors have chosen to go for the grim, I'm-so-shaken-by-the-horrors-of-war-that-I-speak-in-a-monotone-without-any-facial-expressions effect. At first, this is somewhat compelling, but after an hour and a half one gets tired of trying to figure out Douglas's emotional state by watching the vein pop out on his forehead. Reviewers normally describe this type of performance as "controlled" or "understated" but in this case it's just boring.

Only two characters seem strongly moved by the events of the film: the aforementioned prosecutor and the evil general, who is so consistently irate that he looks more like M*A*S*H*'s Colonel Potter on a back day than a man struggling with the responsibilities of authority in the face of bloody warfare.

Though the plot and characterizations of Paths to Glory are generally cliched, Kubric does provide the viewer with some powerful images of the ugliness of war: a comatose prisoner who has to be propped up to be executed, soldiers who have descended to savagery yet cry at the sound of a beautiful song, men going into battle armed only with a revolver and a whistle. But this message is conveyed in the first few frames of the film--war is bad, and sad.

For the next hour and a half, Kubric turns his message into a mantra.

Another viewer of Paths to Glory offered the insight: "It was good in that it was short." One should always wonder about any film whose highest achievement is being short.

If you've never seen Apocalypse Now, Platoon or Bridge Over the River Kwai, then go see Paths to Glory and learn your lesson about the atrocities of warfare. For everyone else, you're better off renting Dr. Strangelove or A Clockwork Orange to get a taste of Kubric's true talent for innovation than wasting your time and money on this disappointing film.