Stanley Kubrick, 1957
I've been watching a lot of movies in a short period of time (trying to meet an arbitrary, self-imposed goal) and let me tell you what I've learned: one of the hardest things for a movie to achieve is to create an intense, sustained feeling in the viewer. For the last movie that created such a strong, overwhelming sense of outrage and blind fury in me, you'd have to go back to Taxi to the Dark Side and that was years ago.
Although Paths is a fiction film and Taxi is a documentary, Paths is based on true events and the two films actually have a lot in common. Both concern corruption in the military, the betrayal of soldiers by their superior officers. Though their styles are quite different, the two films both prove their efficacy and power by sparing us nothing. In the case of Paths, when the three officers, chosen at random (or due to petty resentments) by their superiors to stand trial for cowardice after their batallions failed to advance in a suicide mission, are condemned to die, we don't get to see a terse scene of nobility under injustice and pressure, we follow them almost every minute until they die, watching them unravel.
When we're not looking at them we're watching the officers who condemned them behaving vilely. As a filmmaker you can often score a cheap shot by showing contrasting images, usually emphasizing the "haves" idly frolicking while nasty things happen to everybody else. Kubrick does this too, with a lavish officer's party, but he makes the moment more sophisticated by holding it, letting us lavish in its beauty even as we abhor it. Watching that moment, I remembered Andrew Sarris's famous line, writing about To Be or Not to Be, that Lubitsch made you feel that the Nazis' worst crime was bad manners. Here the officers make a great show of their good manners, but we see that underneath they are hard and hollow. Adolphe Menjou, at his peak synonymous with sophistication and elan, plays one of the generals, suave but callow and cynical, and the revelation of his true nature stings like a whip. This may be Kubrick before his acme, but his uncanny knack for incisive nastiness shines through here. We have a baddie we can (and do) freely loathe in George Macready's General Mireau, replete with a trademark scar. (I totally didn't recognize him as the sap who gets caught between Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth in Gilda.) He's got a stiffness, so upright and convinced of his superiority, even though he's a total shit. But war affects everybody. Even the hero Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), who defends the indicted men, gets intensely maniacal and crazed as he urges men to leave the trenches even as dead soldiers fall back into it.
I don't know if it's my favorite installment of Black Adder, the historical farce, but the fourth series, set in World War I, may be the sharpest and most brilliant. There's a great moment in the first episode when the pompous idiotic general is telling Blackadder about a new tactic. He replies: "Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking very slowly toward the enemy, sir?" He knows this because the plan is always the same. It's a funny and incisive comment for the modern viewer because it reminds us that World War I was primitive and brutal in many ways we can't immediately understand. Kubrick echoes this in relentless, slow shots of soldiers tramping through the mud, getting mowed down again and again. It's hard to imagine a more powerful image of the brutality and idiocy of war. There isn't nobility and courage -- our condemn men go to their deaths terrified. Even here in 1957 you can see things unraveling.
Comments