A film ‘highly offensive to our nation’: Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), Censorship, and Militaristic Representations of Post-War Europe

Stanley Kubrick first read Cobb's Paths of Glory when he was 12 years old, so sometime between 1940 and 1941. Examining the representation of the French army and the European reaction and censorship of the film, this chapter presents the history of Paths of Glory's release in Europe into the cultural and political context of the era. The film's producers, publicists and distributors were fully aware that Paths of Glory would be controversial, a fact that they sought to simultaneously mitigate and exploit. Their key concern was how the militaristic representations of the French in the film would be received in post-war Europe, with a clear understanding of the sensitivities across the continent about such issues. While Paths of Glory had long been a controversial novel that Hollywood had feared to adapt, its militaristic representations were not based on any anti-French sentiment, but on anti-war themes.