Film directors are just the worst people.

How difficult is it to be an extra in a film? Would you need an agent or could you just sign up for an audition? Any info would be nice, I live in Miami so their aren't big films like that one. It must've been amazing to be there and see the whole sequence in person. I know that that scene in particular was really hard to make because it was a continuous shot

Great information! I love hearing behind the scenes stories of how advisers attempt to maintain accuracy and immersion but are dismissed. The early Fast and Furious movies were this way and that's how we ended up with "danger to manifold" instead of something reasonable.

@@davidzshit Well from my limited experience its not like an acting role so I didnt need an agent. Dunno if it works the same in the US but in the UK you can sign up to background artist agencies that will put you forward to production companies for work. Maybe have a Google round and see if there's any near you? The one that put me up for 1917 was free to sign up but they did take a commission from the money I earned, but I still got enough to make it worth doing. And yeah like you said being part of a film like that is really cool, and pretty much a reward enough in itself :)

This seems to be a HUGE issue. Films will hire historical advisors just to have the name of someone to point at and say "hey, we hired a guy." But in the end they don't listen to the advisor. It is amazing that they actually went as far as to have him drill extras. Most just ask a question or two and then ignore the expert.

You mean the things that they probably would have been shooting at? I didn't know about the 7 machine guns per 3,000 infantry part, but I did immediately notice they were all grouped together, which is ridiculous for good overlapping fields of fire.

They must have gotten their machine guns from the same factory that makes imperial stormtrooper blasters.

​@@evilsharkey8954damn that's a good one 😂

I’m fairly certain it was meant as a metaphor, maybe don’t quote me on that, but I think I heard that it was meant to show a sense of how many lives just got snuffed out in ww1 with charges like this. Again, could very well be wrong, but I’m fairly certain it was an artistic choice

And impressive how the rider-less horses just keep running towards these terrifyingly loud machineguns instead of bolting back to safety where they came from.

Yes we all saw that UKposts video 😂

@@johndowe7003 he is just saying bruh

The 1979 All Quiet is also amazing. My favorite movie of all time.

"Everyone was wearing period appropriate uniforms with authentic battle damage, 10/10"

​@@arbiter11171should've just filmed the actual war.

Paths of Glory really need its own WWI-operations analysis video, because Kubrick went with such incredible and faithful detail for the time and resources he had. I would have loved to hear Professor Watson's take on General Mireau ordering the artillery to shell his own men. That actually happened with General Réveilhac during the Souain Corporals Affair, which was the events that inspired Paths of Glory. General Réveilhac ordered the artillery to shell 21st company because they refused to go over the top after seeing the first wave cut down both from accidental shelling and German machine guns. The artillery communication officer on the other side of the line flatly refused to execute the order without having it in writing. The order was never issued, but Réveilhac instead went at it by having 24 of the men picked at random and court-martialed for cowardice. 20 got their execution stayed, but 4 corporals were executed as an example.

I do also love that you can see and hear how much he likes it when it is done right. When the minor little detail is spot on, he is absolutely loving it

Yes he’s great

Yeah, I kind of wish they'd release the full, unedited interview.

Go take his course lol 😂 well one of them

Very much so. The art director, Ludwig Reiber, was born in 1904 in Munich. He was only 10 when the war began, but 10 is old enough to remember, and 14 years old at the war's end is definitely old enough to remember anything the survivors said to or around him.

Still the very best WW1 movie.

It was a WW1 film not WW2.

Hollywood is way too obsessed with war it’s so weird. There are documentaries out there for a reason

Stanley Kubrick is so good. He’s a perfectionist. Barry Lyndon is also a great historical movie.

Indeed. I want to go watch it now.

Exactly, I don't get this film makers fetish to make things more dramatic by adding unrealistic scenes... How is freaking WW1 not dramatic enough by its reality alone??

I have seen something similar to real sword fights. No overly dramatic moves but very deliberate moves. The reality is so tense that it makes you sit on the tip of your chair. This scene is similar. Without all the dramatic effects, it's a really tense and incredible scene.

I think the reason the Blizzard of souls scene was so good is because it's a faithful representation of a book of the same name by Aleskandrs Grīns, who himself was a latvian rifleman and who participated in the battle that was being portrayed.

Your mistake is assuming most people like to think - the majority just like to see shiny things and/or big explosions in order to be entertained. Case and point, why we have so many sequels to Transformers, Fast & Furious, etc.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen an expert give a solid 10/10 on an Insider video.

@@evilsharkey8954 Bro we have seen the sword fighting expert give 12 😂

@@evilsharkey8954 some did, but it's even more surprising from this one as he was probably the hardest one to please and hardly went over 4 or 5

@@williamrobert9898 This guy is no people pleaser, he’s the harshest with the scores so for him to give 10/10 is like being knighted by the king of Britain

Blizzard of Souls is the only Latvian film I've seen and it's one of my favourite war movies. Incredibly well made.

Thanks

Ummm…I don’t know where you got that, but I’m pretty sure it’s wrong. By the end of World War 1, for a number of reasons cavalry WAS obsolete, and machine guns were one of those reasons (I forget the others, except for trenches and razor wire). The fact that they still used it some doesn’t mean it wasn’t.

That's why the stage production is preferred over the film. Plus, the stage production for War Horse is a masterclass in puppetry (for the horse itself).

@@Shadowkey392 I did my MA thesis at Royal Military College about WW1 British Cavalry (particularly the development of their combined arms doctrine), and they were far from obsolete. What the cavalry could do was that in mobile warfare it was a fast moving force that could screen a marching army (basically, prevent enemy scouts from finding it), and properly exploit a breakthrough (and they were the only force in the field in WW1 fast enough to do that). The problem was that the trench deadlock on the Western Front was such that breaking into the enemy lines was fairly easy, but breaking through was a physical impossibility until late 1917/early 1918 (and that was mainly a technological problem). So, most of the British cavalry units got transferred to other fronts where they could be used (like Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc.). And what this in turn meant was that when the war became mobile again on the Western Front in 1918, there just weren't enough cavalry units left in the line to make a difference. But, as far as the role of breakthrough exploitation goes, armour doesn't reach the point of being fast enough to do the job until the 1930s, and even then it's limited by terrain. So, you get Russian cavalry units in the Red Army still being used and quite useful.

@@Garwulf1 Similarly, during the Polish-Soviet war in 1918-21, cavalry saw a lot of use on both sides. And during the invasion of Poland in '39, the Polish cavalry was also notorious for bringing mayhem to the German units wherever it went.

​@Shadowkey392 the Germans used horse cavalry in WWII.

Ah yes the old movies with pale Bri'ish looking pharaohs whipping the poor slaves building pyramids under the cracking whip... also Ancient Greece with white marble statues from 19th century... and Othello in blackface. I mean, modern movies have lots of inaccuracies, often inherited from just copying mistakes done by old films, but let's not pretend historical movies were very accurate at any point in time. There were stand out movies that did the setting justice, notably France Zeffirelli for Shakespeare and Kubrick's stuff like Full Metal Jacket for Vietnam war, and that one weirdo's Alexander had a good battle scene (and wrong everything else). But those are exceptions not the rule.

@@KasumiRINA I think he means old movies about more recent history. There were still a lot of WWI vets to talk to for the earlier movies about it. Nowadays, we have excellent historical understanding but the unrelenting whip of the studio executives wanting looks over realism.

@@KasumiRINA Ancient subject matter compared to movies made with help from people who were alive and active in the time and subject in which the movie is based.

Paths of Glory is hardly "less visually stunning" in my opinion.

It also doesn't hurt when the old movie in question is directed by Kubrick...

conversely you can see when something is so wildly inaccurate it’s troubling him. i love this guy

Calvary didn't have rifles or machine guns in WW1. Your MA thesis must have sucked.

@@jamescerini6993 I'm not sure what makes you so certain, but they absolutely did. Every British cavalryman was armed with a rifle and trained with one. At the start of the war, every division of cavalry was issued with 24 Vickers machine guns, which they would carry into battle. Later in the war, the Vickers would be replaced by Hotchkiss light machine guns.

@@tinyprinceBritish cavalry were not all armed with rifles. I suggest you go and look at the different types of calvary and their function. If you don';t understand the difference between a dragoon and a lancer or what their functions were then I suggest you do some more research. I've looked up that book Cavalry Training 1915, and it is not well regarded or writen. The claimed way that camp would have been attacked is hardly what wouold have actually occurred and the guy who wrote that is using knowledge from a training manual from a time when calvalry were a part of history. The last mass mounted charge in modern warfare was undertaken by Australian Lighthorse at Beersheba. (Dragoons). The Germans and Turkish defending the town knew the Lighthorse would never actually charge because they ALWAYS dismount to use their rifles and fight on foot. In this case they did charge and they took the town and the precious water in the deep wells. Look on UKposts for The Charge At Beersheba and you will see the German officer loudly claiming that they are lighthorse and they will not charge.

Ah a fellow military historian thanks for the source to read

@@jamescerini6993 hate to break it to you but all British Cavalry, whether dragoons or lancers carried firearms - be they carbines or full sized rifles. I assume you’re going to claim the bandoliers all WWI lancers can be seen carrying are simply for decoration. It’s always painful when an armchair historian thinks they know better than those of who who have literally spent years on the subject and were weighed and measured academically.

Agreed. It was a VERY good film.

Masterpiece.

You beat me to it with your comment. 100% agree! The man always did his homework and got the details right. I'm a Kubrick fanatic.

Due to when it was made there were still loads of ww1 veterans around

Same for WW2 cavalry as well.

@@alexanderbenkendorf688 And for the vast majority of cavalry throughout history.

​@@JohnyG29 800 BC to 1600 AD

Cavalry didn't really hold off anyone at Gettysburg. That was put in books after the fact but the first day at Gettysburg you had engagements all over the place at the same time. You had entire infantry corps fighting so a small cavalry action didn't mean a whole lot by July 1st. They were only engaged for about an hour or so.

and it was that cavalry action that led to the positions being taken by either side which led to the battle being as it was…cavalry unintentionally won the battle for the Union

@@yakb.7690WWI was over 100 years ago.

I know absolutely nothing about the Eastern Front, which I honestly find terrible-considering it was the direction the entire conflict was coming from to begin with.

hate to break it to you, but the film was one of those films: the whole premise is that officer defending guys about to be hanged for cowardice as scapegoats for incompetent generals…

@@bostonrailfan2427 My thoughts exactly. This film (which is fantastic) portrayed the French high command (and the military generally) in such a bad light that it wasn't shown in France until 1975. It was also banned on US military establishments and in Franco's Spain for the same reason. Even Switzerland banned it, to avoid offending France.

@@Oxtocoatl13 it was based on a novel that was itself based on real events but twisted into being French instead of British. the movie intentionally left out that the soldiers were guilty of cowardice but tried to claim that it was terrible leadership that was responsible for the failures rather than facing a better equipped, heavily entrenched, and better positioned enemy

Sure is.

“Providing unhealth care” I love that. Well, I don’t love the actual thing, but I do love the way you phrased it

Exactly... When you're shooting at someone who's riding a horse straight at you, you're probably going to hit the horse before you hit the person riding it. Matter of fact, most cavalry injuries in the first world war stemmed from their horses being shot/blown up/etc and the horses falling onto the men, breaking bones and pinning them under the horse.

The movie was BS but for the record: horses (especially well trained war horses) could actually keep running even after suffering a mortal gunshot wound. Running horse generates so much power with its muscles that their blood keeps circulating, keeping the horse moving further even if their heart was shot and would only fall dead after reaching whatever target they were charging. Most notably the horses used by the (now memefied) Polish winged hussars were trained to just keep running no matter what, which earned them a myth of being completely bulletproof, because horses that were shot dead on and essentially killed outright would keep going forwards for long enough to reach the enemy battle line.

@@ahriman935 The movie's ridiculousness is probably why many people prefer the original stage version with a life-size puppet horse.

Spielberg made that exact same scene with Humvees on fire coming back for no reason after aliens blew them up in War of the Worlds. He avoids showing deaths even when it causes non-sense scenes like that.

​@@sapphyrus avoiding animal deaths on screen is conscious choice by filmmakers, another option is making extremely fake CGI ones. Reasons are many from animal rights advocates to viewers not wanting to see animals hurt to rating boards getting nervous to most animals (even trained ones), being unable to be directed to act like they're dying. And nobody wants to injure them or get injured by a hoof to your face trying to get them to do something they don't understand. It's one of those suspension of disbelief scenes that you kinda learn to accept if you enjoy the media.

"Why would they allow that lone, unequipped soldier they don't know anything about to run around, and in and out of a trench, without one of NCOs immediately concluding he must be possible deserter or a spy and shoot him on the spot?"" Because they had their men accounted for, and if he wasn't one of theirs, given they had an attack to go on in less than 3 minutes, he wasn't their immediate problem. "why don't they direct him immediately to the back through the communication trench lines, which lead directly to unit command, rather than allow him to mill about like a crazed, panicking soldier?" 6:34 Expert: This is a temporary trench. Given that it's temporary, I'm betting they haven't yet dug any communications trench lines. Remember that in the movie, they are far out in front of the rest of the Allied forces.

​@@truthseeker308 On top of that, they had directed him to the trench minutes earlier when he said he was trying to reach Colonel Mackenzie. Schofield said he was under orders to deliver the letter directly to the Colonel from Command. The troops knew better than to run the risk of getting chewed out by command for stopping a "suspected deserter" if he actually was a messenger.

My thoughts exactly when I saw this in the theater. No helmet, no rifle, no dispatch runners' bag. Just running in a panicked headlong rush perpendicular to the advancing line of soldiers. He'd have likely been shot or at least an effort to detain him. And don't get me started on the exposition at the beginning of the movie, explaining the mission to the runner. Not very likely. "Here's your bag, here's your orders, get it to this unit". That should be it. Why would you provide a runner with detailed information risking him to be captured and have it tortured out of him ?

lmao he the spy/deserter take is quite silly dude

Because then you would not have this epic final scene. This run scene has become iconic for the movie. A final desperate run risking his own life to save others. Unrealistic, but very cool and awesome.

I was recommended this film recently and it is without reservation one of the best films I've ever seen. Not sure why this Kubrick film is not talked about more often.

If you haven't read them yet, I highly suggest Sun Tzu's art of war (it's incredibly short) and Miyamoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings. They are NOT boring tactics manuals or ANYTHING resembling "chivalrous ancient combat", they actually reveal how pragmating combat (group or individual is). For example in 5 rings, the most famous samurai in history tells you to pick the battlefield so the sun shines in your opponent's eyes, and he suggests holding sword with one hand so the other can be used to throw sand, grapple or punch. See, "Bushido" bullcrap wasn't invented yet. While Art of War talks about pretty obvious stuff that's applicable to everything.

Schools in the US have to teach to the stupid standardized tests.

​@@evilsharkey8954 and Canada who modelled their school sysyrm mostly off the Americans.

He's awesome

It's a similar situation with linear warfare of the 18th and 19th century. "Haha. Such idiots for marching out in the open in colourful uniforms." No, people back then weren't suicidal loons. They were working with the technological limitations of their time and marching in massed blocks made sense in that context due to the threat of cavalry and communication and morale purposes. But, it's easier to mock them, I suppose.

It’s not bigotry so much as ignorance. Most people don’t really understand why things happen the way they do in any war, let alone a dreadful, often stagnating one like WWI. The Dunning-Kruger effect is rampant in armchair historians who read a few articles and watched a few History Channel shows ten years ago and think knowing about the dumb parts makes them smarter than everyone who lived it and/or dedicated years of passionate, professional research to it.

There's something very appealing to most people about the idea that all this was down to foolish generals who mindlessly threw men into machine gun fire. It's an easy explanation with a convenient set of scapegoats. I listened to a lecture series recently that put forward an interesting argument suggesting that the way common soldiers came to characterize the war during its later years as this pointless waste led by cruel elites was partly a way of obscuring the general desire for war that pervaded across social classes in 1914. People really underestimate just how much entire countries were behind the conflict at first.

Ja

ye guy is just blind xD

Would love to see the professor do Blackadder: Goes forth.

There have been battles like that, usually due to grossly incompetent “leadership”, but the actual soldiers doing the running aren’t mindless cannon fodder.

He also missed that the back was steeper and more straight up. As in trying to struggle up the back part that as he admitted was taller.

Read that particular battle was… harrowing to say the least… he served with distinction

If it was 2nd Ypres he probably wouldn't have had a helmet, they hadn't been widely issued at that point.

That's always good to hear from people

Trench warfare was the norm on the Western Front.

All the other fronts of the Great War are drastically underrepresented, just as WW1 itself is drastically underrepresented. I would kill for a good movie about the mountain fighting between Italians and Austrians, or about the East African theater. Very few people even among history buff circles can even name a battle on the Eastern Front.

This applies to the whole Bloodlands spanning the Baltics, East Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine.

Lmfao

Absolutely! The pivotal event of the 20th century. The world we live in today is the result of WWI.

Not 'maybe more', defintely more. Our entire modern world is derived from WW1. We already know that Germany's defeat in WW1 led to the economic and policitcal crisis in Germany in the 1920's and 30' which is the catalyst for WW2 - on the whole. But WW1 was also the catalyst for the rise of world wide Communism when the Germans smuggled Lenin and Co into Russia from exile Switzerland in order to ferment revolution in Russia to force them out of the war - and it worked ... to well! This alone led to the cold war after WW2, with communism spreading around the world. The Korean and Vietnam Wars were the direct results of this. The Iron Curtain and all that sufefring in Eastern Europe for 50 years. Countless wars around the world with arms and equipment flooding into them with the US and USSR backing sides. During the Gallipoli Campaign a Turkish Officer deserted/was captured by the Australians at Hill 60. He happily told his captors that the Arabs fighting in the Ottoman Armies would gladly pick up arms to fight the Turks if given the opportunity. This information eventually filtered back to British Intelligence in Egypt and would lead to Lawrence of Arabia stiring up the Arab Revolt. In return for rising up the Arab leaders would be given land and Kingdoms in 'the Holy Lands' - but the British and French shafted them after the war and drew arbitrary lines on the maps and kept huge chunks for themselves. This directly lead to the ongoing violence between Jews and Palestinians from the 1930's onwards, distrust of the West and all the violence and terrorism out of that region since - including Islamic Terror, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan etc We could also go on about the Japanese feeling betrayed and 'ripped off' in the peace agreements dealing with the Pacific theatre and failing to get racial equality clauses approved in the League of Nations - leading to their move to a more militaristic outlook to resolve their issues ... We would see how that would turn out form 1936 onwards. And this is just scratching the surface! To me, WW1 has always been far mroe influential than most peopel realise. It's not 'forgotten' or in the shadow of WW2, it just never got the Hollywood publicity, because the US missed most of it despite reaping the greatest rewards from it.

Absolutely loved this video.

"The Tank made trench warfare redundent - it just took a while for that to really sink in to the military planning mindset." It REALLY didn't. Kursk was a WW1-style trench battle, and the Ukraine is right now a trench war, tanks notwithstanding.

​@@Garwulf1 Considering we can destroy tanks and radars that cost millions with consumer drones that cost a few thousands, and russians lost over 2000 tanks in one year to the point they had ONE tank left for a parade, tanks hardly made anything redundant. In fact people make claims that tanks are obsolete, but they are wrong too. For offensive campaigns, tanks supported by IFVs are indispensable. We just need more of them.

@@KasumiRINA And that's a very important point. One should be VERY cautious before declaring anything in warfare obsolete. The latest cavalry charge in military history that I know of took place in Afghanistan in 2001. Anybody who thinks that tanks are obsolete because they can be destroyed needs to read more military history - they have always been vulnerable to things like artillery and infantry. But, they're also needed to win, and can do things that only tanks can do. (One of the ironies is that the man who poisoned the English-language historiography of WW1, Basil Liddell Hart, did so in part because by 1929 he had become convinced that tanks had made infantry obsolete - they hadn't - and the British army wouldn't just replace the infantry with tanks like he wanted...leading to the charge of them being traditionalist idiots.)

@@l_W7 Please stop deleting and reposting your comments. You're cluttering up my feed.

He reviewed the newest film in the previous episode. They should show him the previous two adaptations, though.

Another would be The Lighthorsemen

Or the original movie which is simply phenomenal

As an Australian - the 2015 mini series was utter garbage. Go watch the 1980's series the Anzacs. While it has a couple of issues its 100% better than that garbage dished up in 2015 for the Centenary. Even the 1980 Gallipoli Movie is a lot better, and it has some major flaws that still haunt Australian Military History discussions to this day ...

With bulletproof clocks, of course !

Isn't that called survivor bias. Like when WW2 planes returned with bullet holes in the structure so they thought they should armor the structure but found out the ones that were shot in the engines didn't come back. So there was a bias

An injury means the soldier may still come back to the lines after a recovery; a fatality means the soldier is never coming back.

@@logank444 It's different : we're comparing the actual casualities here, which was the opposite problem with the "bullet bias" as we're talking about what killed soldiers in the first place, not the injuries of thoses who could be treated after a battle. It was a fact that many losses happened because of a shrapnels hitting the head of soldiers who had just a cap at the very begining of the war. It's also one of the reasons why russian casualities were high as the Tsar forbid the use of steel helmets as caps made men look more "manly".

​@@comraderowen2434 lmao russians and having ridiculous casualty rate because being smart is gay or something, name a better duo. Bakhmut has several towns worth of russian soldiers fertilizing it. And they just charge over the corpses. Killing fields.

@@nm7358 bingo…concussed or cut is better than blown apart.

I agree!

The "ditch guy"

Because he needs to get to the commanding officer to stop the attack. The plot of the movie is the battalion that we see in this clip is walking into a trap, but they don't know it. He leaves the trench because there are too many soldiers in the way of his end goal, the command tent, and he needs to attack to end as soon as possible. I assume he goes the way does because it's closer, and he's afraid the officers will try to stop him if he goes the other way.

Yes the trenches would have been cluttered but also zig-zag

You mean the fields kilometers behind the previous frontline? Those fields couldn‘t have been shelled, as they weren’t in range of the artillery before.

@@legofan4047 Except any advance is preceded by a creeping barrage...

@@Cervando Not when the Colonel has advanced way ahead of the rest of the BEF and is prematurely attacking out of an ad-hoc trench with whatever he's got on hand.

@@mortman200 Except it was a scheduled attack, not a premature one, and thus would have been preceded by a creeping barrage. Not to mention the retreating Germans must have been particularly careful not to disturb a blade of grass as they withdrew to their new trenches, despite the actual scorched earth policy the Germans adopted during the historical retreat. Finally, the land had already been fought on earlier in the war, as the Germans advanced through France.

@@Cervando thank you for this. You are 100% correct and its always entertaining to see how many armchair historians in the comment section of videos like these try and argue with people who actually understand the context of the situation in question.