The character:	Colonel Dax
The actor:	Kirk Douglas
The movie:	Paths of Glory (1957)

There are maybe three heroes on my list of heroes that I am genuinely surprised the AFI didn’t spring for, which is another way of saying that I think I have three pretty dull heroes on my own list. The winner on both counts is Colonel Dax, the lawyer-turned-soldier in World War I who finds himself living in the very center of Hannibal’s Cannae. On one side of the pincer, the Germans. They are defending the Anthill with their machine guns and barbed wire and with the aid of daylight and, above all, the idiotic French strategy on their side. On the other side, the French high command. Pressure from one general falls upon another, and the pressure from that general falls upon Colonel Dax. Thus Colonel Dax has no choice but to turn that pressure into a bunch of dead Frenchmen, a cast that he is lucky not to have joined himself.

Kirk Douglas had a way of being scorned. Scorning others comes out more roughly in his work, which I think must fall primarily on him, but I also blame some of the screenwriting of the time, which tended not to leave anything to the imagination. Ace in the Hole, for all of its many virtues, is one of the offenders here. The cleaner arrogance of The Bad and the Beautiful wears better. The scorned Kirk Douglas is a difficult object to comprehend. One does not easily scorn someone as seemingly Aryan as Douglas, for society has taught us that there are harsh consequences for striking someone who presents the way he does. (The irony of “Issur Danielovitch,” a name that Douglas got rid of about as quickly as he could, can’t be lost on any disciple of Richard Dyer.) Nor does one simply attack a man who has a head shaped like Douglas has. He looks too much like a Scout whittled him out of a particularly thick stick, the chin and cheekbones jutting out, the brow shading his fierce eyes.

Adolphe Menjou and George Macready can scorn Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory because World War I has stripped or diminished his features. He is dirty and soiled with the unspeakable gunk of the trenches. He wears the helmet for protection, but the helmet rounds off his features rather than emphasizing their strength. It is not coincidental that Colonel Dax is easy to demean, his concerns easy to shrug off, when he is in the trenches with his helmet. In such a place, donning such a coxcomb, Dax can be ordered about and made to do things which any sane person would dismiss as indirect suicide. In the high-windowed palaces and dim clubs belonging to generals, absent the helmet and bathed enough to get the filth off, Dax’s dignity is so closed off that he can even fool Menjou’s Broulard about his intentions. Didn’t you challenge Mireau’s orders so that he would be made to look incompetent, Broulard asks, and thus take his command?

Paths of Glory is not a movie about personal insults. The men who die for Mireau’s pride on the Anthill are anonymous. The men who die for Mireau’s pride in front of the firing squad are men with names and personalities, but they’re chosen basically at random, victims of chance off the battlefield as many of their corpsey comrades were victims of chance upon it. Broulard delivers just about the only personal insult of the film, one that Dax, not idealistic but at least honest, can appreciate in that sense even if Broulard was trying to pat him on the back.