Kubrick's brave anti-war film remains one of the most cool-headed assaults on cold-blooded murder ever filmed. A Korean War-era audience could take little comfort in the fact that these scenes of ritualized slaughter were set during the First World War. The story, taken from a novel by Humphrey Cobb said to have been 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 against superior German forces. A suave, uncaring Adolphe Menjou and a pathologically paranoid George Macready are the generals who shield themselves from blame, while Kirk Douglas is entirely convincing as the white knight who challenges their scheme. Paths of Glory is a stunning masterpiece of composition and cinematography, comparable in its beauty and pathos to the anti-war films of the late twenties (Road to Glory, Westfront 1918, and All Quiet on the Western Front). But in its concentration on lunacy in the high command, and in its brittle cynicism, it is pure Kubrick, and in Dr. Strangelove it echoed into the atomic age.