Paths of Glory
By Kit Macdonald
Stanley Kubrick's third feature film, made while he was still in his late 20s, is arguably the best film about the First World War, and has a decent claim to being his best film overall. Based on a 1935 novel by Humphrey Cobb, it vividly captures the horrors of war by laying bare corruption, incompetence and cruelty among the officers commanding three companies of French soldiers on the Western Front. They order an attack on a well-defended German position that everyone knows will be a suicidal failure, and when it duly fails they decree that three scapegoats are to be selected at random, court martialled and shot, to deflect the blame.
Kirk Douglas plays Colonel Dax, who leads the doomed attack and then reverts to his former profession in civilian life by defending the unfortunate trio during their farce of a court martial. Bleak though Paths of Glory is, it ends on an unexpectedly hopeful note in a scene starring Susanne Christian, a young German actor who later became Kubrick's wife.