Paths of Glory

• 1. Introduction

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  Paths of Glory opens in 1916, in the trenches of Northern France, with a snare drum playing rhythms that recall wartime newsreels. Stanley Kubrick's 1957 film follows Colonel Dax, a French officer who watches soldiers sent into an impossible assault and then stands to defend them when they are court-martialed for cowardice afterward. The source material stretches back further still: to a real wartime execution in 1915, to a 1935 novel by Humphrey Cobb, to a failed Broadway play, and to a stanza by Thomas Gray written in 1751. How does a poem about a country churchyard become one of the most unflinching anti-war films ever made? And how did a picture that no major studio wanted to touch end up being called a near-perfect film by at least one of the leading critics of its era?

• 2. The Souain Affair

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  Four French soldiers were executed in 1915 under General Géraud Réveilhac for failing to follow orders. They were exonerated posthumously in 1934, nearly two decades after their deaths. That injustice became the factual core of Cobb's 1935 novel, which in turn took its title from the ninth stanza of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," published in 1751: "The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

  The French Army did carry out military executions for cowardice during the First World War, as did most of the major participants. The United States sentenced 24 soldiers to death for cowardice during the same conflict, though those sentences were never actually carried out. Kubrick's film added one particular emphasis: the practice of selecting individuals at random and executing them as punishment for the failures of a whole group. That idea is related to the ancient Roman practice of decimation, which the French Army used rarely during the war.

  Cobb's novel was adapted for the stage in 1935 by Sidney Howard, a World War I veteran who had also written the screenplay for Gone with the Wind. The Broadway production was a flop because its harsh anti-war scenes alienated audiences. Howard nonetheless continued to believe in the material, writing that the motion picture industry had "a sacred obligation" to make the story into a film.

• 3. Getting It Made

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  Kubrick had read Cobb's book at the age of 14 and described it as having "great impact" on him. When he and his producing partner James B. Harris were working with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer under head of production Dore Schary, Kubrick suggested Cobb's novel as their next project after finding nothing in MGM's existing pile of scripts and purchased novels that interested them. Schary strongly doubted it would succeed commercially, and he was not alone: every other major studio had already turned the story down. MGM's specific objection was that the film might be unfavorable to European distributors.

  After Schary was fired from MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris brought a script version to Kirk Douglas. Douglas read it, agreed to star, and secured a budget of roughly $1 million from United Artists. More than a third of that budget went directly to Douglas's salary. The film was co-produced through Douglas's own company, Bryna Productions, alongside the Harris-Kubrick Pictures venture.

  Because the film depicted the French military in a deeply unflattering light, it could not be shot in France. Production moved to Bavaria, Germany, and took place largely at the Schleissheim Palace near Munich. Kubrick hired around 600 German police officers as extras, because their three years of military training made them convincing as soldiers. The battlefield itself covered 5,000 square yards of land leased from a local farmer, and Kubrick spent a month arranging the set before any battle footage was filmed.

• 4. Writing and On-Set Conflict

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  The screenplay credit became a dispute of its own. Calder Willingham had done substantial work on the script with Kubrick, while Jim Thompson had written earlier drafts. Willingham claimed he was responsible for 99 percent of the final script and that Thompson had not written any of the dialogue. When Thompson's draft was actually compared against the finished film, it was clear Thompson had written seven scenes, including the reconnaissance mission and the scene with soldiers the night before their executions. The Writers' Guild ultimately credited the screenplay to Kubrick, Willingham, and Thompson, in that order.

  The most consequential dispute was over the ending. Kubrick and Thompson had initially added a conclusion in which the men's lives are saved at the last minute, intending to make the film more commercially appealing. Kirk Douglas rejected this outright. His account of the confrontation is vivid: he described calling Kubrick to his room, throwing the script across the room, and demanding a return to the original ending, saying, "I got the money, based on that script. Not this shit." Kubrick, according to Douglas, simply listened calmly and then asked to shoot the scene one more time. They returned to the original script, and Douglas later called the film possibly the most important picture Kubrick ever made.

  A separate conflict arose from actor Timothy Carey, who was eventually fired during production for being extremely difficult to work with. He reportedly faked his own kidnapping at one point, holding up the entire shoot. His remaining scenes were completed using a double. A different kind of incident involved veteran actor Adolphe Menjou, who was made to perform the same scene 17 times. After Menjou exploded at Kubrick in front of the entire crew, Kubrick quietly asked for one more take, and Menjou, as Douglas recalled, went back to work with "utter docility."

• 5. Sound and Image

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  Gerald Fried's musical score for the film leans heavily on percussion instruments, specifically military drums. The opening snare drum establishes a rhythm that recalls wartime newsreel footage, and the film closes with the same drum roll, a deliberate signal that nothing has changed.

  Cinematographer George Krause worked with Kubrick to give the film a low-key, grainy look that matched archival photographs Kubrick had studied in the library. Richard Anderson, who played the prosecutor in the court-martial, recalled Kubrick's preoccupation: "The shot. Always the shot." The black-and-white format sharpened the contrast between two worlds: wide, decadent shots of the officers' mansion set against cramped, suffocating close-ups in the trenches.

  At the close of the film, the only female character in the picture performs the German folk song "Der treue Husar" in a tavern for French soldiers who have just survived the execution of their comrades. Through close-ups and shifting angles, the audience watches hardened men begin to hum and then sing along, an expression, as the source puts it, of their basic humanity. The actress playing the singer was Christiane Harlan, credited on screen as Susanne Christian. She and Kubrick met on the set and later married; they remained together until his death in 1999.

• 6. Release and Censorship

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  The film had its world premiere in Munich on the 1st of November 1957. A special non-review screening had been held earlier, on the 18th of September, for about 300 guests including army officers, Radio Free Europe staffers, and film figures, alongside Kirk Douglas and actors Janet Leigh, Tony Curtis, and Ernest Borgnine. In the United States, the film opened at the Fine Arts Theatre in Los Angeles on the 20th of December 1957, and five days later at the Victoria Theatre in New York City on Christmas Day. A trade journal explained at the time that the two-city release before the year's end was designed specifically to qualify the film for Academy Award nominations at the ceremony to be held on the 26th of March 1958.

  Despite those hopes, the film received no Academy Award nominations at all. The French government placed enormous pressure on United Artists not to release the picture in France, and the film was not shown there until 1975, when anti-war attitudes had shifted. Spain banned it outright; the film was not screened there until 1986, eleven years after the death of Francisco Franco. Switzerland declared it "incontestably offensive" to France and prohibited screenings until 1970. The film was also withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival to avoid straining French-German relations, and was not shown in Germany itself until two years after its American theatrical release. The United States military banned it from all military establishments, both domestic and overseas.

• 7. Critics Divided

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  Bosley Crowther, reviewing the film in The New York Times on the 26th of December 1957, called the execution scene "one of the most craftily directed and emotionally lacerating" he had ever seen, while also naming two "troubling flaws." He argued that using American accents and colloquial English for French soldiers in a World War I story blew "the illusion of reality" every time anyone spoke. Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times cited similar concerns about the language in a piece published on the 16th of January 1958, and used them as part of his reason for leaving the film off his list of 1957's best.

  Whitney Williams, previewing the film for Variety on the 20th of November 1957, anticipated limited commercial appeal, calling it "dated" and predicting the box office outlook was "spotty at best." Harrison's Reports, an independent and advertisement-free journal, similarly doubted the film would perform commercially and described its central theme as "a grim and unpleasant study of man's inhumanity toward man."

  Not all critics agreed. Richard Gertner of Motion Picture Daily, writing shortly after the Munich premiere, called it "a brilliant and arresting film" and advised exhibitors not to promote it as just another action film, arguing it carried "timeless ideas relevant to any war." Jay Carmody of The Evening Star in Washington, D.C., winner of the Screen Directors Guild's "Critic of the Year" award for 1956, praised Kubrick for directing with "chilling incisiveness." William Zinsser at the New York Herald Tribune described the editing as first-rate in his December 26 review, noting that Kubrick's scenes made their point "with economy and bite."

  Gene Siskel, in a 1987 episode of the televised review series At the Movies, declared it "a near perfect film," second in his estimation among Kubrick's work only to Dr. Strangelove. Roger Ebert added it to his "Great Movies" list on the 25th of February 2005.

• 8. Legacy

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  In 1992, the Library of Congress designated Paths of Glory as "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. The original film elements were later found to be damaged; they were restored over several years using digital studios in Los Angeles, and the restored version was screened at the London Film Festival in October and November 2004. Christiane Kubrick, Stanley's widow, made a guest appearance at the start of that performance.

  David Simon, creator of the television series The Wire, which ran from 2002 to 2008, has named Paths of Glory as a key influence on the HBO drama. The connection is specific: Dax's failed attempt to protect his troops from the inhumane decisions of his superiors directly shaped The Wire's depiction of institutions working against individuals in positions of middle management.

  Robert Zemeckis paid direct homage in 1991 with a Tales from the Crypt episode titled "Yellow," adapted from a 1952 Shock SuspenStories story about a colonel whose son faces a firing squad for cowardice. Zemeckis cast Kirk Douglas and his son Eric Douglas in the father and son roles. As of March 2025, Paths of Glory holds a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 77 reviews, with a score of 90 out of 100 on Metacritic from 18 critics.