Year: 1957
Like Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, Paths of Glory too is understated. There is hardly anything that affects the viewer or catches attention in the first 45 minutes or so of the film, except for the scene where the general goes on asking the soldiers if they are ready to kill Germans & there is this one soldier, shell shocked, with an almost happy expression on his face, foreseeing his death in the battlefield.
Paths of Glory does not directly give any anti-war messages, there are no long speeches about it, no sentimental tear-jerking scenes, but Kubrick manages to make his point clearly.
His one voice of conscience is the Colonel Dax, who ultimately goes about business of war as usual, failing to protect his men from both the enemy in the battlefield & the enemy within. But the movie does manage to affect viewers in a subtle but powerful manner.
Scenes of war are neither glorified nor are they shot in a way as to induce horror. They are rather matter-of -fact & normal. What stand out though are the court martial scenes, with the prosecutor & judges bearing an almost diabolic quality, making the helplessness of the prisoners & Dax more apparent.
The scenes that build up to the firing squad executions are somehow more dramatic than the execution itself. And by underplaying gruesome elements like the shooting of the wounded prisoner, almost dead from his injury... who is "pinched on the cheek a couple of times" to wake him up before he faces the firing squad, Kubrick manages to horrify his viewers in a delicate & lasting way.
Overall, Paths of Glory is one of the most powerful anti war statements on celluloid, ever, along with Full Metal Jacket, & surely one of Kubrick's best.
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