Paths of Glory 1957 ★★★★★
joshmatthews’s review published on Letterboxd:
The Bluray makes this movie looks like it could’ve been made at late as the 1980s, that combined of course with the camerawork and cinematography. Hard to come up with another movie that looks like it was thirty years ahead of its release date.
Kirk Douglas’ Colonel Dax is a wonderful character. He plays the idealist hero whom audiences should root for, but “Paths” tricks us a bit by depicting Dax as naive and a willing participant, enabling the hypocritical and unjust scenario he finds himself in. I say that even though, really, I have no good solution for him, other than to quit or to go to a higher authority than the top general in the movie.
That opening scenes between the generals is so exquisitely done, with the setting in a Kubrick favorite: an old European mansion filled with the greatest artifacts of European civilization. The generals are squirrely moving around screen though, as they feel each other out about why they are attacking the “anthill.” This sets up the entire movie as a harsh comment on bureaucracies, a dominant Kubrick theme (as it will turn out as his career progresses).
Dax believes that he can tell the truth and someone will listen, that justice can be served. The entire movie says otherwise, from his inferior, the cowardly lieutenant who accidentally kills a soldier and then lies about it, to the prosecutor at the trial, who gives the judges his smiling eyebrows as a hint that he’s right and the defendants are guilty. The acting is really perfect — all the little gestures and looks and up to frustration for the audience, witnessing the ordinary soldiers get screwed over while the higher-ups remain in their positions.
That ending is tremendous, playing with Dax and with us. He’s the observer listening to the soldiers hoot at a captive, the only German who appears in the movie, a young woman. She turns the men by singing a German folksong, and they sing along, crying. This seems to be a silly movie ploy, the men shifting instantly from howling animals to blubbering babies. However, the whole scene of schmaltzy sentimentality is observed by Dax. He is then told that it’s time to move back to the front, the place where all the movies injustices and insanities have occurred. He’s compliant. Yes, let’s move out. The final shot is Dax returning to his office, saluted by his guard.
In other words, he’s back into the bureaucracy, all in on the war, even though he naively told off the top general in the previous scene and refused a promotion. There, he looked tough and defiant. But he’s part of the system that got those three innocent men killed, one that enabled his superior to order his men fired upon by the artillery. This he accepts, and it’s partly because he witnesses the sentimentality of the masses (the soldiers listening to the German woman) that he can accept the way things are. Man, is that a biting comment by Kubrick!