For episode 3 we traveled back to 1957 for Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick's early World War I film starring Kirk Douglas. We both gave it four and a half stars.
Jeff came in knowing Kubrick mostly through Dr. Strangelove and The Shining, and this was a revelation. What stuck with him first was the craft: a tracking shot early on follows a general walking through the trenches, and it sets the tone for how deliberate the whole film is. He loved Kirk Douglas in the lead, and the ending got him. A German girl is brought out to sing for a room of hollering soldiers, and by the end of the song they've gone quiet and started to cry. To the generals running the war, soldiers can become a game of numbers. Up close, they're young men with real depth.
Dark satire, not exactly anti-war
Matt saw it as dark satire in the vein of Dr. Strangelove, just more muted. Early on, two French generals discuss an attack on a position called the Anthill. One calls it impossible, until a promotion gets dangled in front of him, and suddenly it's doable, with casualty estimates of fifty or sixty percent treated as an acceptable cost. When the attack fails, three soldiers get put on trial for cowardice, and the whole thing plays like a sham.
Matt doesn't read it as a straightforward anti-war film so much as a film about honoring the individual soldier, closer in spirit to All Quiet on the Western Front. He wouldn't rank it in his top ten war films, and thinks other Kubrick movies reach higher, but for what it sets out to do, he thinks it's very well made. He also liked the choice to shoot in black and white, which gives it the feel of real World War I footage.
The war behind the movie
Jeff brought some real history into the conversation. France went into World War I with a population of about forty million and lost 1.4 million soldiers, not counting the wounded. He compared the doomed, everybody-just-run charge in the film to tactics developed later in the war, like the moving barrage, where infantry advanced in coordinated waves with the artillery. He's seen it firsthand: he's visited the Vimy battlefield in France, where a version of that more careful planning was used.
One more fact, courtesy of Matt: the actress who sings in that final scene, credited as Susanne Christian, later married Stanley Kubrick.
Paths of Glory is streaming free on YouTube, with ads. Hear the full conversation, along with our Toy Story 5 review and our top five Spielberg films, on episode 3.