"...if those little darlings won't face German bullets, then they'll face French ones!"
Gen. Mireau

Credits

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Producer: James B. Harris
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson, based on Humphrey Cobb's Paths of Glory
Music: Gerald Fried
Running time: 86 min
Cast: Kirk Douglas (Col. Dax), Adolphe Menjou (Gen. Broulard), George Macready (Gen. Mireau), Ralph Meeker (Corp. Paris), Joseph Turkel (Priv. Arnaud), Timothy Carey (Priv. Ferol), Wayne Morris (Lt. Roget), Richard Anderson (Maj. Saint-Aubain), Emile Meyer (Priest), John Stein (Capt. Rosseau), Susanne Christian (German Girl)

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Plot

During WWI, politicking generals Mireau and Broulard order Col. Dax's regiment to capture an impregnable enemy position. When the suicidial attack fails, three rank-and-file soldiers are chosen to stand trial for cowardice, under penalty of death. After a show trial in which the men are condemned, Dax is informed that Division CO Mireau ordered artillery to be fired on his own troops. Dax attempts to use this information to save his men, but to no avail: they are shot and Broulard dismisses Mireau only to offer the job to a stunned Dax.

In depth summary with quotes

Commentary

An excerpt from The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick

Norman Kagan, 1989

[Gavin] Lambert [of Sight and Sound] points out that more frightening than the physical horror of combat is the social structure of the war: "...The world seems cruelly divided into the leaders and the led. The officers conduct their foxy intrigues in elegant rooms of a great chateau, and the setting somehow emphasizes their indifference to human life. The men go to the trenches and into battle, as in peacetime they went to offices and factories."

A...heuristic critical approach is to see Paths of Glory as a dramatized model of society (clearly created by a brilliant nihilist). Lambert has pointed out the class structure of this society. Its cruel, dehumanizing, and pointless "work" is production in a consumer economy, allegorically intensified. The lives of its citizens are "mean, nasty, brutish and short"; they tend to advance in proportion to their wits, endurance, aggression, and tolerance for inflicting pain. The closer to the top, the worse they are...There is no law or justice...and the trappings of civilization---the exquisite chateau--are used for displays of vanity, ambition, treachery, and monstrous "public relations stunts" like the trial.

Looking at Paths of Glory as a model of a Hobbesian state, Gen. Broulard becomes a darkly ambiguous and enigmatic figure. His seduction of Mireau into attacking the Ant Hill, his decision to sacrifice the three men "as an example," his outfoxing of Dax's blackmail plan and betrayl of the vain Mireau, all "make sense" in this dog-eat-dog reality...At the last, when he says he pities Dax for fighting idealistically "a war we've got to win," Gen. Broulard reveals himself as what novelist George Mandel calls a "super realist," a ruthless hero of the dark uncertain world where most issues, like the attack, can never really be resolved; a world the liberal Dax will not accept. If the life of the soldier, of each of us, is at heart conspiracy, as Kubrick suggests, only Broulard is shrewd, devious, and powerful enough to have his conspiracy triumph.

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An excerpt from Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis

Alexander Walker, 1999

The film has sometimes been compared to All Quiet in the Western Front, which Lewis Milestone made in 1930. This is a natural, yet misleading, comparison to make. Both are American films that sink their national identity into a depiction of “foreign” combatants in World War I---in Milestone’s film, the Germans; in Kubrick’s, the French. Both are unsparing with their battlefield detail. But Milestone argued that the good man’s only response to war is pacifism; his film’s emphasis on sacrifice in battle is what keeps his protest reverberating still. It shows lives wasted. Kubrick’s film, on the other hand, takes its stand on human injustice. It shows one group of men being exploited by another group. It explores the social stratification of war. No man’s land is not really the great dividing barrier between the two sides in Paths of Glory; the “two sides” actually wear the same uniform, serve the same flag, and hold the same battle line, though in vastly differing degrees of comfort. The actual division, the deeper conflict, is that between the leaders and the led. It exists whether there is a war or not, but a war situation widens the division fatally. Only by implication is Paths of Glory a protest against war as such; it is much more pertinently an illustration of war as a continuation of class struggle. The paths of glory in the title are not the ones that lie across the battlefield; they are the avenues to self-advancement taken by the generals in command, with the utmost indifference to the fate of the men in the trenches.

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