Watching a bug scamper past his last meal, a soldier laments, “Tomorrow I’ll be gone and that cockroach will have more contact with my wife and kids than I will.” Another soldier reaches over and squishes it saying, “Now you have the upper hand.” This scene neatly encapsulates the absurdity and dark humor that is Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory.
Kubrick entered new territory with Paths. He’d dealt with war before in his little seen first feature Fear and Desire and he’d already started exploring man’s dark alleys in the films noir Killer’s Kiss and The Killing. But here, he had a new challenge – working with a major star. I’ve seen Paths many times, but watching it the other day was like seeing it anew, as is always the case with Kubrick’s films. They seem to morph to match each new age.
This time, Paths felt like a game between Kubrick and Kirk Douglas just as the generals (chess masters) and colonels (knights) and soldiers (pawns) of the film are engaged in a great game of chess. (Kubrick was a chess master and used this metaphor often.) Douglas is determined to be “the movie star” and he gets his glamour shot moments and big speeches. But Kubrick effectively counters his every move. It’s as if Kubrick is saying, “It’s a dirty world, Kirk. Stop trying to redeem it.”
The story centers on a mad general who orders Douglas’s Col. Dax to lead soldiers in a suicidal attack on a German position known as the “Ant Hill.” (That’s short, of course, for “worthless objective.”) When the men fail to make it beyond the wire – their wire, not the enemy’s – the mad general ponders the scar bisecting his cheek and then orders three men to be made an example. They are to be court-martialed and executed for cowardice.
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