There is a stark difference between minimalism and economy. A minimalist film uses little and gives little; the point of it is to look at and contextualize all the negative space between the lines. The economical film, on the other hand, hones and whittles away any distracting excess from every sound and image to produce a focused, strongly potent effect. Whereas minimalism cannot help but depend on a certain cerebral detachment, the economical film is pure cinema. Pure in an absolute sense; all the impurities, everything that could possibly confuse the directness of its impact, have been boiled away.

At 89 minutes, Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory is very lean and very mean, standing as a reminder of his divine grasp of the economist aesthetic. Kubrick's subsequent films would typically go on much longer than this one. Ever the wizard; although this extra time never really served to develop the characters or advance the plot, Kubrick never made it feel self-indulgent or fatty. Every single frame in a Kubrick film feels essential to the whole. Even when his films turn dull, like the bombing procedural in Dr Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb or the prisoner initiation in A Clockwork Orange, you sense that the boredom has a specific visceral purpose (respectively to show how pointless bombing procedurals are, and to drive us in sympathy with our narrator and protagonist; being out on the streets giving the in and out to some lovely devotchka is certainly more fun and more fulfilling than being stuck here in prison after all).

Kubrick is the overbearing dominatrix to our sniveling masochists; the withholding of stimulation becomes a form of stimulation in itself. Watching Paths of Glory, it occurred to me that producer/star Kirk Douglas didn't quite get his money's worth with this film. I mean as far as egotistical handjobs go, Douglas' humanitarian Colonel doesn't leave much of a dent. A major reason for this is the film's short length. While I didn't understand Barry Lyndon that much more by the end of his three-hour picture, he left a rather solid impression by sheer virtue of his extended screen exposure (a luxury not afforded to Douglas). The cinema of Stanley Kubrick is so absolute that he exploits the length of his films for its sheer psychological weight.

Generally speaking, more Kubrick tends to equate to better Kubrick. I don't find Paths of Glory to be as satisfying or complex as his subsequent work; with greater size often seemed to come a more refined emotional palate and a stronger commitment on the viewer. Kubrick had considerably more freedom and experience when he helmed films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange or The Shining, not to mention the perversely difficult Barry Lyndon or Full Metal Jacket, and he used and exploited it. Unlike these subsequent films, Paths of Glory is not a stand-alone masterpiece. While Kubrick would later break away from genre conventions and almost create his own category of cinema, Paths of Glory fully inhabits its genre framework. In the context of his other films, this feels like a bit of a minor work.

But with that said, Paths of Glory is a clean, swift kick in the nuts. If it doesn't make up the whole meal, it is at least a bitter, black little bon-bon of a movie; a detox for a mind addled by condescending pap, candy-coated piety, and just plain pedestrian filmmmaking. It would be too easy to call this the perfect chaser for a helping of Pay It Forward, but certainly after something like Deep Impact or A Time to Kill, Paths of Glory is just the thing needed to regain your faith in the cinema. Kubrick's motivations for making the film were to some degree undoubtedly calculated. He was set on becoming a well-regarded filmmaker and making a name for himself, and he knew a "liberal outrage" picture would certainly get him there faster than another film noir picture like his previous film The Killing. But unlike his admittedly awesome 1960 epic Spartacus, which Kubrick has subsequently disowned (he once said in an interview that he has no idea what to say to people who tell him that they loved Spartacus), Paths of Glory can't be mistaken for a film by anybody else.

The film looks like a Kubrick film for one, reminding primarily of the bits we've seen from his documentary short Day of the Fight and his photojournalist work for "Look" magazine. His working style seems to be to first set up a concrete unchangable environment and then look for the best possible shots in this environment. He was one of those perfectionists who insisted on getting all the small details, on making sure the sink in the bathroom was actually running regardless of whether or not he was actually shooting it, you know. This wasn't necessarily because he was interested in producing a deep reality, but because he never knew how he was going to shoot a scene ahead of time and so it was necessary that his subject existed outside of the filmmaking process. Had he known exactly what he was doing and how he was going to do it, one-dimensional facades would have been enough. This working process has always made the look of Kubrick's films just a little odd. He is basically shooting a living, breathing, organic environment in an inorganic way.

As every shot in a Kubrick film is the shot, the best possible shot out of all possible shots, Kubrick's style could be described as documentary filmmaking with the naturalism and spontaneity bled out of it. The philosophical implications of this aesthetic would get somewhat more complex in his later work (they would get Nietzschean about the journey toward spiritual actualization), but the implications drawn in Paths of Glory are quite fruitful.

Paths of Glory is a rather straightforward atheist work. Following an unsuccessful charge on an unwinnable hill, three men are selected by their company commanders to be charged, under penalty of death, for the cowardice of their entire regiment. One is selected for political reasons: he saw his commander kill another soldier in friendly fire. Another is selected because of the social prejudices of his company. He never really fit in and they would feel better if they were to get rid of him. The third is picked by sheer chance, basically having picked the short straw. The first two tell us that it's basically other human beings that fuck you over. The third tells us that God won't protect you from it. Either he isn't there, he's forgotten you, or he just plain doesn't care. The one picked by fate is, of course, the best soldier. During his trial, Douglas reads off his commendations for bravery but the court is unmoved.

Before the three men are put to death, a priest comes to their cell to hear their confession. It is this soldier who most passionately refutes God. He mocks religiosity by reciting a memorized prayer to his wineskin, inferring that he probably was once quite God-fearing. He says, "May I tell you something, Father? Back in my hometown there was this certain cafe with an amusing little sign over the bar. It said, 'Don't be afraid to ask for credit as our ways of refusing are very polite.'" Then he punches the priest in the jaw for "tormenting" them. Indeed, there is no deus ex machina rescue in Paths of Glory. All three of these men are convicted and executed, and they die without honor or reason. They don't come off as martyrs but rather as just three poor bastards who were unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Ask yourself, would a conscious and loving God really allow something like that to happen?

The problem of evil is one of those perennial issues in theology, and while Paths of Glory doesn't exactly try and solve it, it does serve to illustrate it. Many films have shown evil people and events, but Paths of Glory is a rare film in that we interpret this presence of evil as the absence of God. This is due largely to the Stanley Kubrick aesthetic. Typically filmmakers have two choices: they can make a good-looking film or they can make a bad-looking film. If they opt to make a good-looking film they can't help but to idealize and deify their subject matter. (Jake LaMotta has to be some kind of an epic hero if he is the subject matter of a Martin Scorsese film, right?) If they make a bad-looking film, well, they may retain their integrity but they leave their audience disaffected and bored.

In Paths of Glory, Kubrick's visual style manages to divorce aestheticism from theism. This has to be one of the best-looking "ugly" films that I have ever seen. Yes, we can examine the work of directors David Fincher, Marcus Nispel, Tarsem or even David Lynch (particularly post-Twin Peaks David Lynch). Their films eroticize death, dying and decay; they're necrophilia chic, and as such they never really solve the innate problem of aestheticization. They refute the God of traditional aestheticism, but replace Him with their own pagan God of Death, thus never effectively seceding from theism. Paths of Glory, on the other hand, is a powerfully visceral, well-made and cinematic film that nonetheless successfully depicts evil and its fallout through the lens of atheism; that is to say, as banal and meaningless.

I think that it's the sky that sticks out to me the most. I'm sure that bright sunny days can be properly evoked through black and white photography, as I'm sure that I have seen it done quite successfully before, but I'd be damned if I would almost forget it watching Paths of Glory. The skies are at a perpetual off-white, making it feel as if there is always a storm coming in. When Mr. Sun does make an appearance, it's through the window of the prisoners' quarters. As the prisoners are quartered in what is basically a stable, the scene becomes a subtle parody of Birth in Bethlehem iconology. Under Kubrick's lens this light bath comes to resemble one of the spotlights of his Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb: not a God-made symbol of hope and holiness, but an oppressive man-made symbol of intrusion. This beam of light does not hold the promise of discovery or adventure in the supernatural as it does in a Spielberg film, but rather the exact inverse, the great white void of death courtesy of these soldiers' humanly fallible mother government. Kubrick never shows the enemy during the battle scenes (or if he does, it's to an extent so marginal as to be negligible).

The crux of the action happens in the trenches, where the soldiers nurse their wounds, shit their pants and get chastised by their superiors. The battlefield itself is a barren wasteland. There doesn't seem to be anything better or different on the other side; the soldiers' only purpose in going seems to be to die in the transit. There is very little music in the picture. The bits that you remember are the sarcastic use of "La Marseille" and the German peasant girl at the end. This decision doesn't lend Kubrick's film any real objectivity, nor does it neutralize its awesome filmic energy. Quite the opposite really; without music the starkness of Kubrick's images are emphasized and their power focused. Without music, Kubrick shows that he resents coddling, placating or condescending to his audience, and he prevents his film from glorifying or deifying his subject matter. Had the soldiers been given some mournful music to underline their suffering, there is no doubt that they would evolve into martyrs.

Much of the attitude in Paths of Glory is contingent on Kubrick's casting. In a rather brilliant move, he brought in "B-movie" character actors to play the three condemned men. Joe Turkel, who plays the private chosen by chance, did a number of crime dramas and film noirs such as The Naked Street before appearing in Paths of Glory. In 1980, he played Lloyd the bartender in Kubrick's The Shining, making him the only actor to appear in Kubrick's work both before and after 2001, but he is probably best known as the evil Dr. Tyrell in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Ralph Meeker, unforgettable in the brilliant Kiss Me Deadly, probably has the meatiest part as the soldier chosen out of politics. He seems to have been given more screen time and more psychological weight than the other two actors, perhaps because his character is of a higher rank than the other two (he is a corporal rather than a private), and Kubrick wants us to better witness the degree of his downfall.

This perhaps softly reflects the trajectory of Meeker's career. The Leonard Maltin Movie Encyclopedia offers: "This dour, sluggish actor didn't have what it took to be a movie star. He was a solid supporting player whose delineations of blustery, cowardly characters revealed a more prodigious talent than was suggested in his infrequent starring turns." In other words, Meeker was not a supporting player by design, but by default. Despite some fairly noteworthy TV and stage work (He replaced Marlon Brando for the late forties/early fifties Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire! That would have been a real pisser of a performance, could you imagine?), and a place on the 1989 Academy Award memoriam following his death, Meeker never quite broke away from the B-movie circuit. The typically egotistical film fanatic Quentin Tarantino once said something along the lines of Meeker's being the one career that he wishes he could have saved.

And then there is Timothy Carey, who Tarantino almost did resurrect in the role of Joe in Reservoir Dogs. Carey is a legend in himself, a real original. Directors either loved him or hated him. Actors pretty much uniformly hated him; if we are to believe Carey, it was Kirk Douglas that terminated his relationship with Kubrick and Keitel that kept him from doing Reservoir Dogs. He was a powerfully self-indulgent and self-absorbed actor, taking hamminess to a degree in which it became baroque. When Carey is in a movie, it becomes his movie, and this no doubt helped to significantly alienate his fellow actors. Following Paths of Glory, Carey played the villain in United Artists' 1957 Poor White Trash and AIP's 1965 Beach Blanket Bingo. In 1962, he wrote, produced and directed The World's Greatest Sinner, a rock satire with songs by Frank Zappa that cast a spell on John Cassevetes, who would cast Carey in his 1976 film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Still, we probably know him best from Kubrick's previous film The Killing (a film that also featured Joe Turkel, by the by) where he played the guy who assassinated the race horse.

This is some cast! The baggage that they bring to the film may have only been half-intended by Kubrick, but it works in the film's favor. Casting film noir actors in a "liberal outrage" statement picture helps to keep it ignoble, bleak, and in a certain way much more real. Film noir style always suggested that there was something, some force, whilst it be government conspiracy, criminal conspiracy or just "fate," that encompassed the protagonist. This force never had our best interests in mind, but it existed all the same. Paths of Glory, not to hammer the point into the ground, omits this malevolent omnipotent force. It does however retain the distinct kind of desperation that we sense from film noir anti-heroes as the sky begins to fall.

Paths of Glory, when we take it on its own terms, is really a near-perfect movie. Still, noir style seems to have taken up the brunt of Kubrick's work in that it effectively found an aesthetic and visceral place for ugliness. The genre basically started up the fine art of kicking viewers in the nuts. Kirk Douglas' performance, no, more like his presence, serves as a handy contrast to Turkel, Meeker and Carey. Douglas is handsome, charismatic and pure Hollywood cheesecake. The first shot we get of him is when he is putting his shirt on, giving us a good look at those fabulous abs. He's presented as the hero of the piece, but despite his best efforts the character never quite gets anything done. The soldiers, after all, still get shot at the end. He contributes to getting the number tried and executed down to three, not that the film sees that as a very big accomplishment in the grand scheme of things. Despite his compassion, the film still sees him as a bit of an aristocrat, as ultimately coming from an entire different world than the condemned.

But the three noir icons are actually much more than a subversive presence; they also happen to be damn good actors who turn in damn good performances. Turkel is somewhat unique among the three in that he has a well-mannered crystal clear voice and an elegantly suave body, with none of the unformed primal masculinity of Meeker and Carey. The Y factor that distinguishes him from Hollywood nobility seems to be his utter lack of natural charisma. He's not sleazy as much as icily sterile. He would have made an excellent Hannibal Lecter. When he refutes the priest near the end of the film, you feel that his argument is solid, that he has clearly thought hard about it and won't be quivering for salvation upon being tied down and blindfolded.

I'm not sure that Meeker is outstanding here, but his performance is certainly quite solid. Meeker has that same "blusterly, cowardly" quality that we saw in Mike Hammer, but he gives his character smarts and a consciousness, a degree of idealism (after all, he's being executed in part because he threatened to tattle on his commander) that Hammer didn't have. Meeker shows that he is capable of a real complexity; he realizes that being smart is ultimately futile and sort of wishes that he could take refuge in the cynicism of Turkel or the moronic dopiness of Carey.

The Carey character is sort of an overgrown man-child. He spits out his last meal after he suspects, for no real reason, that the military drugged the food in order to make them "groggy" and easier to execute. Upon facing death, he starts to have a loud crying fit, and it feels unnatural, as if Carey decided that he needed to do some real "acting" in the scene. And yet, the self-conscious sloppiness of the performance doesn't really distract from the scene. It works, reading simply as forward momentum, aggressively confronting us with the ugliness of the injustice.

The justifiably famous ending of Paths of Glory never fails to affect. A German peasant girl is brought out on stage in front of a crowd of jeering French soldiers, some looking like refuges from Otto Dix's montage painting "Cardplaying War-Cripples," a sort of jarringly vulgar image for a relatively mainstream film released in 1957. (I suppose I am thinking of the old man in the crowd, clapping his half limbs together and whistling through his broken teeth.) The emcee makes some off-color remarks about her body and her lack of talent, and then forces her to sing. She does so and gradually the crowd, now humiliated by their display of callous inhumanity, begins to sing along. The scene is not at all saccharine because you sense that Kubrick is playing for keeps. Obviously, he doesn't sugarcoat the reality of the scene; we end up tasting every last globule of bile. But the scene isn't just another visceral kick in the nuts; it has a clear purpose and meaning. That the soldiers sing along says more about them then it does for her: it shows that the charges of cowardice against the army were likely correct. These men are weak.

Even though Paths of Glory is set during the distant World War I, a courageous note seems to have been touched in making the innocent a German. Most films made during and after World War II seemed to be unable or unwilling to conceptualize the German civilians as being victims of war. Either they were lumped in with America's (and France's) horrid enemy race, or they were ignored altogether. Just two nights ago, I watched a hilariously overwrought '40s melodrama called The Mortal Storm about a family being torn apart in 1933 Germany. It starred Jimmy Stewart. That, of course, is vastly different from Paths of Glory. So is The Sound of Music. In Paths of Glory, there is no getting around the fact that this girl is German; I mean, it is a German song, German culture that is used to communicate vulnerability to the crowd of Frenchmen. This shows that Kubrick has made an honest and genuine anti-war picture instead of one piggybacking on the political prejudices of the time. He seeks to break through temporal nationalist considerations and put his story in purely human and philosophical terms.

One of the most popular charges against atheism is that without some sort of moral foundation any and every action will suddenly become justifiable. Kubrick had said that The Shining was essentially an optimistic work in that it was about ghosts, and anything that suggests there is something after death is by definition optimistic. This reminds me of a statement from Brian DePalma's Casualties of War where Michael J. Fox opines: "Everybody's acting like we can do anything and it don't matter what we do. Maybe we gotta be extra careful because maybe it matters more than we even know." And there is the atheist's anti-war credo. Religion makes death palatable and comfortable; it takes the weight off of it. That's fine if you are mourning, but it also happens to make the act of killing and taking life palatable and comfortable. Things like the military execution and the entire fact of war are made possible by a civilization that is able to deny the finality of death.

The soldiers of Paths of Glory seem to get this. The film is different from Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket in that these men aren't naive enough to believe that they will find spiritual actualization through the act of war. All it represents to them is the threat of, and later the certainty of, death. The absolute cold vacuum of death.

In an interview with Gene Siskel while promoting Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick responded to the oft-repeated criticism that he was a "misanthropic vampire" by saying, "You don't need to make movies like Frank Capra in order to like people." I'm not sure that this really applies to his later greater work which I believe moved beyond dealing with human concerns directly, but it describes Paths of Glory absolutely perfectly. You're never this shook up after watching a Capra picture.