The Frame

Paths of Glory is early Kubrick…1957, which puts it after The Killing (which is awesome, BTW, I highly recommend it) but before almost any of his other classics. And it’s good, as I expected, but it wasn’t wow. It’s about equal parts war film and courtroom drama, as an upper commander in the French army during WWI orders his unit to make a suicidal dash across no man’s land to try to take out a German pillbox. After the attack inevitably fails, the commander finds three soldiers to bring up on charges of cowardice, claiming that they had disobeyed the attack order and retreated, thus undermining the morale of the rest of the unit. The second half deals with the mockery of a trial that follows, as the captain of the unit defends his men against the trumped up charges. It’s a good study of WWI and the total disconnect between it and the way wars were fought before WWI (the wars the upper commander was trying to emulate)…the pitched battle with its “glorious” charges just doesn’t work in the face of machine guns. And the trial was strikingly similar to the mockeries put on by the Nazis and the Soviets as pretenses to a justice system that they no longer adhere to. Beyond those two points of interest, though, I wasn’t as awed as I’d hoped to be.
Well Above Average