A Film Canon

An unusual deconstruction of the late 50s courtroom drama, Paths Of Glory extrapolates its narrative trajectory from the claustrophobic economy of the trenches at the height of stalemate, effectively precluding the deus ex machina responsible for that genre’s peculiar use of the ‘twist’; or, rather, ensuring that when it occurs, it is met with a bureaucratic-sadistic machine that immediately contains and cannibalises it, deflecting the heightened theatricality and unpredictable feminine presence upon which it depends into the otherwise incongruous postscript. In the process, Kubrick elegantly fuses an affirmation of American justice, with a criticism of the McCarthyist witch-hunt, in the figure of Col. Dax (Kirk Douglas), a lawyer turned soldier compelled to defend three soldiers against the charge of representative cowardice, and whose exquisite restraint artfully encourages a proportionately vigilantistic impulse on the part of the viewer, producing one of the most visceral, agitating depictions of injustice in all cinema. It’s also worth mentioning Kubrick’s relatively unprecedented elaboration of the trenches, encapsulated in one of the foundational instances of his distinctive, labyrinthine, almost cognitive tracking-shot. as well as the more derivative, albeit spectacular, depiction of no-man’s-land, which combines the realism of All Quiet On The Western Front with the technological sublimity of The Big Parade, in keeping with the film’s dual affirmation of the grandeur and horror of militarism.