:IMAGE.half :INFO.half Paths of Glory (1957) Kubrick at twenty nine tracks his camera down a trench and puts a general's vanity on trial instead of the soldiers. :STATS [icon:CLOCK] Runtime | 88 minutes [icon:STAR] Director | Stanley Kubrick [icon:CHART] Budget | $935,000 [icon:FIRE] Cinematography | Georg Krause :INFO Two Kinds Of Space The film alternates between two architectures and lets the contrast make the argument. The generals meet in chateaux, all polished floors and mirrors, where the camera glides in wide arcs around men discussing percentages of acceptable loss. The soldiers live in trenches, where Kubrick puts the camera at chest height and walks backwards ahead of Kirk Douglas as he moves through the line, a shot that has been copied for seventy years. An impossible attack is ordered for the prestige of one officer, it fails, and three men are chosen at random to be tried for cowardice so that the failure has a cause other than the order. The court martial occupies the final third and is filmed as theatre, with the verdict known to everyone in the room before it begins. :JOURNEY Watching Paths of Glory 3 Bargained 4 Doomed 5 Slaughtered 4 Arbitrary 5 Rigged 5 Humbled :QUOTE [quotetype:plain, subtitle:General Mireau · Paths of Glory · 1957] The men died wonderfully. :CHECKLIST What to watch for [ ] Chateau scenes in sweeping arcs, trench scenes in straight backward tracks [ ] Nobody in the film ever sees a German soldier [ ] The insect names for military objectives [ ] The chequerboard floor of the court martial as a game board [ ] The final song and the faces of the men listening to it :NOTE.half The French government leaned on distributors and the film was not released in France until 1975. Switzerland banned it too, and it was kept off American military bases. :NOTE.half The German girl singing at the end is Christiane Harlan, who married Kubrick the following year and remained with him until his death in 1999. :LINK https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050825/ Paths of Glory on IMDb: full cast and crew