****SPOILERS****
Glory is an American Civil War movie with a difference - it focusses upon the first black regiment in the Union Army, the 54th Massachusetts. At the time even the most enlightened liberals thought that blacks were simple and childlike, certainly not fit to be trusted with guns and incapable of maintaining the discipline of a real army regiment. The 54th Mass., under the command of the young Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, were to prove them wrong.
The film opens with Shaw (Matthew Broderick) at the battle of Antietam. We see him stumbling around the battlefield, dazed, disoriented: he hardly seems to notice the wound in his neck which is bleeding over his collar. This wound is to send him home for a while, back to Boston, where his liberal, well-connected society family takes tea with Frederick Douglass and informs the somewhat shell-shocked Robert that a black regiment is being formed and his name has been put forward to command it. Robert, still dazed, agrees to the command and enlists the help of his friend and fellow officer, dilettante Cabot Forbes (Cary Elwes), as his second in command. His black schoolfriend Thomas (Andre Braugher), now working with Robert's father, is first to enlist, and soon the regiment is filled, with both free blacks and runaway slaves in the ranks.
Following war movie tradition, the film focusses on four particular rank-and-file soldiers: the rebellious, hate-filled runaway slave Trip (Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor); the gravedigger Rawlins (Morgan Freeman); Robert's friend Thomas; and Jupiter Sharts. Trip is a troublemaker, always trying to drag someone into disaster with him. He hates whites and refuses to believe anything will be better for blacks after the war than before it - as he tells Shaw, "You get to go on back to Boston, big house and all that. What do we get?" Rawlins is his antithesis - sober, reliable, he responds to Trip's taunt that he is a white man's dog by telling him that for the past three years those "white boys" have been "dying in their thousands, dying for you, you fool." Thomas, well-educated, used to the good life and a paper-pushing job, finds army life hard to deal with, especially as Robert refuses to treat him any better than the other enlisted men. And then there is Jupiter, a dead shot but with a nervous disposition, he worries about how he will perform under fire.
Shaw is an interesting character, and Matthew Broderick gives a terrific performance, really allowing us to see inside him, into his mind, so filled with doubts and worries. Shaw, only twenty-six years old, realizes his own limits as a leader. He fears he is weak and as a consequence can be too harsh with the men, outraging his friend Forbes who treats Thomas just as he always has done, as a friend and not a lowly private. There is an excellent scene where Trip has been captured deserting (although it subsequently turns out he was only out scavenging for shoes, as his feet, like most of the men's, are raw and blistered from marching). Robert orders that he be flogged and Trip takes off his shirt showing his back criss-crossed with scars from other whippings. Forbes turns on Robert, shocked that he is going to allow this to proceed: Robert merely ticks him off for disagreeing with him in front of the men and orders the drill sergeant to carry on. Throughout the flogging Trip's eyes are fixed defiantly on Shaw's: he does not cry out, or make a sound, but tears trickle down his face. This mute endurance is more agonizing than any amount of shrieks and howls could be, and Broderick lets us see exactly how much it costs Shaw to have ordered this. He can feel himself being forced to change by his command, and he hates himself for it. He also feels that he does not understand the men at all - not how they think or feel, or their camaraderie, or even their music, and this alienation is deeply disillusioning.
Slowly, however, they begin to grow together. The men are told that they will be paid less than white troops and as a protest they refuse to take any pay at all. In a gesture of solidarity that seems to surprise himself, Robert announces that the officers will not draw pay either. Slowly but surely he becomes proud of his men and they learn to respect rather than fear him. The next obstacle they face is the army command's refusal to let the men actually fight: they are being used as manual labour. Morale plummets and the troops begin to feel they really are back to slavery, losing all the pride in themselves that they put on with their army uniforms. Robert blackmails and browbeats his commanding officer into sending the 54th into combat, and they acquit themselves well, beginning to destroy the belief that black troops cannot fight like whites. Eventually, they are allowed to lead the attack on Fort Wagner, a strongly-defended Confederate base which we are told is the key to capturing Charleston, SC. This is a suicide attack, and the scenes of carnage will have you cringing in your seat. The attack fails, and we are told in a caption before the credits that in fact Fort Wagner was never taken. The 54th lost over half of its number in the attack, among them Shaw, who was buried in a mass grave with the rest of his men. A terrible waste of life, but one with great symbolic importance - the 54th showed that black troops could be as courageous and strong as any white regiment. Their bravery helped turn the tide in favour of black regiments, and by the end of the Civil War there were 180 000 black soldiers, critical to Union victory.
The battle scenes are a large part of this film's strength. Civil War re-enactment groups were closely involved and as a result these scenes have a terrifying reality. The closest comparison I can think of is Saving Private Ryan - the battle scenes have something like the same immediacy, the same power to make you curl up in your seat and yell powerlessly at the characters - "don't go up there!"; "get your head down you fool!". In Saving Private Ryan we have this reaction without knowing any of the characters, which I suppose means its scenes are stronger. I thought, however, this film was more realistic in one respect: when Shaw is killed, he is just killed, like any of the men; in Saving Private Ryan the Tom Hanks character has a long-drawn-out, dramatic, philosophy-spouting death, suitable for the biggest star in a Hollywood movie but not perhaps entirely realistic 8). At any rate, the battle scenes are powerful - particularly as they bring home what war was like before these days of long-range weapons. The men of the 54th had to wait until they could see the faces of the men they were shooting, and hold their nerve as the enemy walked toward them. I couldn't do it.
Overall, then, I would highly recommend this film. It is polished, well-paced, and well-executed. There is a wonderful, moving score by James Horner. The acting is terrific, with all of the main characters made rounded, interesting and accessible by the actors. And, most of all, it has a fascinating story behind it - a key moment in American history, when blacks were at last acknowledged and given a chance to fight for their own freedom. It is an ugly footnote that even after the example set by the 54th Mass the US Army was largely segregated until Vietnam.
(c) Jennifer Mellerick 1999