Stanley Kubrick's anti-war film is still one of the most cool-headed assaults on cold-blooded murder ever filmed. The story, based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb which was supposedly based on a true incident in the French Army in 1916, traces the court-martial and execution of three soldiers chosen as scapegoats for the failure of a suicidal French infantry attack. Often compared to Hawks' Road To Glory (1926) for its painfully realistic trench scenes, or to Pabst's Westfront 1918, Paths Of Glory differs from its predecessors in its concentration on the corruption of the military high command.

“Paths Of Glory is often cited as a powerful anti-war film, but, as Gavin Lambert has observed, Kubrick is concerned less with the horrors of war than with the underlying social evil - the tremendous gap between the leaders and the led - that war merely intensifies. The real enemies are the vain, hypocritical generals who run the war from a safe distance.... There are moments in Paths Of Glory that foreshadow Dr. Strangelove's dark humor....

“Paths Of Glory contains the most obvious illustration of what critics have discerned in all of Kubrick's work - the sense of a pre-determined design, from which deviation is impossible. From the opening sequence, which firmly establishes the pattern, to the cynical note of false optimism at the end, the film moves relentlessly through one incident of bitter irony and utter futility after another....”