During a show business career that stretched back to the mid-1940s, Kirk Douglas could be counted upon for projecting a certain indignant intelligence on the screen.
Whether playing a bilious newspaper reporter in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), a rascally Revolutionary War heathen in The Devil’s Disciple (1959), or a prison inmate who takes pleasure in his own insubordination in There Was a Crooked Man … (1970), Douglas often chose roles that required equal parts brain and brawn. The actor died on Feb. 5 at the age of 103.
Yet, for his most enduring achievement in the movies, Douglas not only showed off his own smarts but pulled off the neat trick of proving that Stanley Kubrick had a heart.
In 1957, Kubrick co-wrote and directed, and Douglas starred in and helped to produce, the classic World War I drama Paths of Glory. Based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb, the film centers on the tug of war for the soul of Col. Dax, a French army officer, played by Douglas, who reluctantly executes his orders to lead soldiers in a suicidal assault on the “Anthill,” a fortress under the control of the Germans. Perceiving the futility of the exercise, some soldiers refuse to join in.
After the failure of the mission, a trio of soldiers are rounded up for a court-martial on illegitimate charges of cowardice. Calling on his background as a lawyer, Dax does right by his conscience in arguing on behalf of the soldiers, but despite the depths of his rage, he is unable to spare the men from the firing squad. “The men died wonderfully,” says Gen. Mireau (George Macready), the man most responsible for the Anthill mission.
The wanton wastefulness of the attack and the detestable dishonesty of the charges that spring from its failure more than justify the title of the book and film, which is plucked from Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard: “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
In many ways, Paths of Glory is definitively Kubrickian. The film is chock-full of elements, attitudes, and even specific scenes that would reemerge in the director’s later films. The way in which the camera courses through the trenches, passing the glum, already defeated men huddled in mud-and-lumber tunnels, calls to mind the elegantly winding camerawork of The Shining (1980). When Mireau scrutinizes the soldiers and refers to one man’s rifle as his “best friend,” many viewers will surely flash-forward to Full Metal Jacket (1987), in which a drill sergeant instructs Marines-in-training to give their rifles “a girl’s name.” Even Mireau’s opulent quarters, decked out with carpets, fine furnishings, and priceless art, suggest the cavernous downtown estate of the well-heeled Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Yet it must be admitted that Paths of Glory is a different sort of Kubrick film. In no other film was the director as exercised in his opposition to war. In Dr. Strangelove (1964), Kubrick treated nuclear war as a subject for black humor, while in Full Metal Jacket, he presented a Marine’s up-close experience of killing in cool, evenhanded terms. In Paths of Glory, though, the emotional cost of fighting and dying is tallied: The film comes to a close in a bar, where ill-mannered, testosterone-fueled soldiers are quieted by the sweet singing of a German girl, played by the woman who was later the director’s third and final wife, Christiane.
To what do we owe these unusual (for Kubrick) displays of indignation and compassion? Credit must be given to the presence of Douglas, who, as both a producer and an actor, fortifies the film with his moral bearing. “You’re a degenerate, sadistic old man, and you can go to hell before I apologize to you now or ever again!” Dax tells Gen. Broulard (Adolphe Menjou), who mistakes the colonel’s scruples for a desire to move up the ranks. It is an outburst inconceivable in Kubrick’s mature output. In the final scene, aware of the soldiers’ reaction to the German girl’s singing, Douglas sighs and averts his eyes, his countenance revealing a man painfully aware of the countless other Anthills yet to come.
In fact, Douglas, perhaps more than Kubrick, seems to have viewed making Paths of Glory as a matter of principle, as he described in his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son. Agreeing to help make the film via his Bryna Productions, Douglas told Kubrick, “Stanley, I don’t think this picture will ever make a nickel, but we have to make it!” Douglas recalled that, before shooting got underway, Kubrick attempted to alter the script so that the condemned soldiers’ death sentence is changed to a 30-day term in the guardhouse. Douglas saved the film from what would have been a fatal commercial concession, telling the director, “We’re going back to the original script, or we’re not making the picture.”
While promoting Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick gave the impression of having moved on from the nakedly anti-war sentiments of Paths of Glory, telling the Chicago Tribune: “War memoirs show us that many of the men who aren’t destroyed by the horror and stresses of combat, at least in retrospect, view their participation in the war as the greatest moment of their lives.” Of course, such a balanced position is admirable, but to everything there is a season. When it comes to cinematic depictions of war, there is a time for equivocation and a time for an actor as purposeful and stalwart as Douglas to shout, at the top of his lungs, that something is wrong.
Maybe Douglas himself, writing in The Ragman’s Son, put it best: “I think the movie is a classic, one of the most important pictures — possibly the most important picture — Stanley Kubrick has ever made.”
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
