This is the second letter in a reading series on books adapted by Stanley Kubrick, while also reading along with a new biography by Kolker and Abrams called KUBRICK: An Odyssey.
Humphrey Cobb: Paths of Glory. London: Penguin, 2010 [1935].
The inter-imperialist war of 1914 may have been triggered by a single assassination, but the conditions had been prepared by European powers for some time. Germany, with its allies Austria-Hungary and Italy, wanted to seize colonial territories from Britain and France and take Ukraine and Poland from autocratic Russia. Tsarist Russia had its own ambitions to conquer Turkey, and to seize Galicia, a partition of Poland, from Austro-Hungary.
Britain wanted to stamp out Germany as a competitor on the world market, and had a particular interest in Palestine as the geographical bridgehead between Africa, Europe, and Asia, and a connection to its imperial holdings in Egypt and India.
And France, who had the Alsace-Lorraine region, rich in coal, taken from them by the Prussians in 1870, saw a chance to get it back.
And thus, the first world war went underway, debuting heavy machine guns and nerve gas and other horrific munitions. This drive to divide and re-divide the world, as natural to capitalism as wage exploitation, created a pile of corpses far, far larger than those made by any social revolution.
And these soldiers truly died for literally no good reason, especially in the static warfare of the “Western Front” between France and Germany.
The pointlessness of this imperialist war is captured in Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb, which he wrote and published in the mid 1930s. This otherwise solid fiction would be remembered as the source for Stanley Kubrick’s next movie after The Killing, since he was looking for dark and gritty material that might produce a hit.
Humphrey Cobb was indeed a veteran of WWI, serving in the Canadian Army. He was at the front lines in the 1918 Battle of Amiens in France. He set down a monument to the absolute pointlessness of the conflict in the shape of Paths of Glory, an anti-war novel contemporary with All Quiet on the Western Front.
Stanley Kubrick remembers first encountering Cobb’s book in his high school years. “It was one of the few books I’d read for pleasure in high school. I think I found it lying around my father’s office and started reading it while waiting for him to get finished with a patient.” It “made an impression on me, not because of its literary qualities but because of the troubling and tragic situation of three of its characters — three [whittled down from five in the novel] innocent soldiers accused of cowardice and mutiny who were executed to set an example.”
A note at the end of Paths of Glory tells us that Cobb based the essential narrative thread on similar events in the French Army from 1915.
It’s a short and punchy novel, to be sure, reporting the action with the minimum of pathos. The crisp dialog carries most of the narrative, as indicated by how the first chapter kicks off with a jaunty debate between two soldiers, Duval and Langlois. These lines from Langlois include the first of a motif of bodily functions.
I’ve been out on this front for nearly two years and I haven’t seen a case of diarrhoea yet. And the reason is that when men get scared they get tense and things inside them solidify. Functions stop. Secretions dry up. When you hear a shell coming straight at you, you hold everything, even your breath.
Langlois the most educated and literary-minded of the regiment, and his reflections on the “lottery” character to honors and awards are a chilling premonition of how he will end up drawing the lot for execution:
But it’s different from the usual lotteries in this way—your chances of winning prizes increase each time you win a prize. Anyway, that’s the way it seems to work. Or perhaps it’s more like making money. After the first million, the rest comes easier. . . .
The bad guy for sure is General Assolant, who will only set up the hapless soldiers for the firing squad, just to cover his own butt, and is introduced dropping these lines of casual racism: “Why doesn’t he use the Moroccans? They’re good with the bayonet, which is what the place will have to be taken with, hand-to-and. And besides, they’re black and our losses will be heavy.”
Speaking of bayonets, we get more of Langlois’s ponderings on that weapon while he’s among the trenches, at the cusp of the doomed-to-fail attack on the strategic hill called “The Pimple.”
A cruel-looking thing, a bayonet, Langlois thought. And the cruelest looking of all, the French one. Perhaps because it was the most slender, the purity of its lines the most perfect, its intrinsic proportions the nicest. Or, perhaps, because it had the reputation of making the wickedest wound, the quadrangular wound that was so difficult to heal. Langlois had never used his bayonet, and he never would unless he was caught with an empty magazine in front of an oncoming German.
One very interesting moment, not included in the film adaptation, evokes the Dreyfus affair as a reason not go with a Jewish soldier who was nominated for the execution. This is the kind of cynical logic we’re dealing with here.
When Captain Sancy receives the General’s orders, he takes the grim decision to have the soldiers draw lots for the summary court martial. Where is the justice in condemning a pan for a collective crime that, in fact, no one committed? His answer: “Who said anything about justice? There’s no such thing. But injustice is as much a part of life as the weather.”
The novel ends very abruptly at the scene of the execution. Kubrick actually put in two more scenes to take the edge off this bleak story, including a emotional moment from Kirk Douglas, and the famous singing done by Christiane, whom Stanley would later marry.
As if portending to how expanded and protracted Stanley’s shoots would become, the Kubrick biography gives two chapters to PoG’s development and production to The Killing’s one.
Kubrick had scrawled out a list of the male leads he had in mind for the role of Dax, and it’s essentially the greatest stars working at the peak of Hollywood: “Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, James Mason, Robert Mitchum, and Kirk Douglas. For the supporting cast he considered Spencer Tracy, Peter Ustinov, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, James Mason, and Gregory Peck.
In the end the role went to Douglas, who with his angular face caked in mud in the trenches and no man’s land, resembles a discarded statue. It was Kubrick’s first time working with a major star — and Douglas was the main source of leverage to get the project financed, since Harris-Kubrick Pictures was drowning in debt.
The biggest learning curve for Stanley was working with a major star rather than an ensemble cast of good character actors. He had to learn to cater to Douglas’s ego. […] But perhaps to appease Douglas, Kubrick continued amplifying the role of Dax. Originally a peripheral character, he became the film’s core.
Another fascinating point mentioned in the biography is that for the second time, after Sterling Hayden, Kubrick cast someone who informed on Communists to HUAC. At the same time, Kubrick was willing to work with blacklisted writers to develop scripts. This will naturally come to a head with the next film production….
Finally, here’s a longer passage taking up Kubrick’s oft-discussed “meticulous” style of work. Kubrick is one of those directors along with David Fincher and maybe Arthur Penn who were willing to do up to a hundred takes for a scene. Is it OCD or actor torture? The biographers (and modern film buffs) prefer to view it as a striving to capture on-set magic.
The legend of Kubrick’s demands for multiple takes of a scene is legion and has reached the status of mythology. The truth is a bit more mundane. True, Kubrick was driven and demanded perfection, but that perfection had to be found, discovered by having his actors repeat a scene until Kubrick recognized just what he wanted. Kubrick came to a shoot completely prepared. Still, he needed to complete that preparation by seeing what was needed to complete his vision. The chess player had to be sure what moves his actors would make, even if they had to make them over and over before he could proclaim ‘check’. At the same time, his actors weren’t always as prepared as he was and mistakes were made.
So far, Stanley Kubrick is presented as an extremely talented young filmmaker, pretty immature in the other areas of his life, but above all a director trying his darndest to make populist films, only to create modernist masterpieces, almost in spite of himself.