Paths of Glory│Eureka Entertainment
Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
There are few greater pleasures, for me, than watching an old film that I have admired all my life resurrected in all its pristine glory. The distributor Eureka Entertainment is a dab hand at such home entertainment miracles and this week releases a Special Edition 4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray of Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war classic Paths of Glory. To be honest, I only watch the film about once a decade at most, but its power never diminishes. After watching it again, in the crispest print I have yet seen, I felt completely numb by the end. And rightly so. The war film has never been the same again since Saving Private Ryan in 1998, but Paths of Glory, made in 1957, summons up neither special effects nor the gore of war, just the abominable power of words and language, semantics used to distort the meaning of heroism and sacrifice. War is despicable and mad – and the very worst construct of man – and Kubrick captures this insanity through the hypocrisy of generals, through the contrast of sequestrated chateaus and the stench of the trenches, to the duplicity of verbal phrasing used to condemn a man’s loyalty (and ultimately his soul). Here, Kubrick deploys all his characteristic tricks of camera placement and. movement – and of lighting – but also of understatement. The eminent character actor George Macready plays General Paul Mireau who is all bonhomie and French pride and in the silkiest tones tells Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) that his men are, “scum, the whole rotten regiment. A pack of sneaking, whining, tail-dragging curs. What is more, it is an incontestable fact.” And this terrible indictment uttered immediately after so many had given their lives in the name of military orders, for ultimately what was a political gesture. In war men don’t matter, only the outward show of strength, and this madness not only continued after the end of the First World War (in 1918) but after the end of the Second World War as well. Lives will always be expendable in the name of history.
As usual with Eureka Entertainment, the bonus material on the Blu-ray is of an extremely high quality. There are three in-depth interviews with film experts, kicking off with the historian Peter Kramer who gives a comprehensive history of the film’s evolution. We learn that United Artists were initially wary of the material, for a number of reasons. The production company felt that, in 1957, viewers weren’t interested in films about the First World War and, as most audience members at the time were women, it was problematic that the script contained not a single female character. A way round this was to add a scene with a woman which they could use in the film’s publicity and trailer, as well as to build up one of the characters in Humphrey Cobb’s original novel in order to attract a major box-office star. As Stanley Kubrick only had one studio picture under his belt at the time (The Killing), he had little bargaining power, and so found himself re-writing Jim Thompson’s screenplay alongside the novelist Calder Willingham. Kirk Douglas was drafted in to play Colonel Dax and whose own production company, Bryna Productions, stepped on board to co-produce. At the time, and in his autobiography, Douglas said that he wanted to support young filmmakers, but he also tied Kubrick into a restrictive five-movie contract, which the director was only allowed to break after achieving some autonomy following the success of his next film, Spartacus – which also starred Kirk Douglas. The second interview is with the filmmaker and comedian Richard Ayoade, who bares his Cambridge education with a thoughtful, incredibly detailed analysis of the filmmaker, using such words as “hubristic”, “mechanistic” and “existential,” while getting at the essence of a director who he obviously, unequivocally, admires. Ayoade also discusses the intentional banality of the language, showing how people lie – even to themselves – by using a cloak of cliché, and how we never actually see the enemy (the Germans) in the film, a ploy Christopher Nolan used in another anti-war masterpiece, Dunkirk. All this makes one appreciate the thought and effort that goes into making a truly great film (beyond the performances and the locations), the way Kubrick will use a tracking shot or how he will engineer a line of dialogue. I think I should also point out that Humphrey Cobb’s novel was actually based on a genuine incident and that the token female presence – the sole actress in the film – Susanne Christian, ended up marrying Stanley Kubrick a year later.
Paths of Glory is now available on Blu-ray from Eureka Entertainment
Eureka Entertainment is the leading independent distributor of classic silent/early films in the UK. In 2004, Eureka! established the award winning Masters of Cinema Series, a specially curated director-led Blu-ray and DVD collection of classic and world cinema using the finest available materials for home viewing. In 2014, Eureka! established Eureka! Classics intended to highlight a broader selection of classic and cult cinema, and in 2017, Eureka! established Montage Pictures, a label celebrating ground-breaking and thought-provoking world cinema from new and upcoming directors.
