This devastating anti-war film focuses on an actual incident that took place among French forces during World War I in which three soldiers from a regiment that failed to advance on the enemy were randomly selected and executed for cowardice. Kubrick relentlessly demonstrates how the real act of cowardice was perpetrated not by the soldiers in the field but by a vain, ambitious general who has willingly sacrificed his troops to advance his own agenda at headquarters. Kirk Douglas both produced the film and stars as a colonel who attempts to intervene in what he sees as a miscarriage of justice.