Showing posts with label Glory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glory. Show all posts

Sunday, August 21, 2016

The Toasty Critic's Top 5 - Second Film

Reviewing my top 5 Movies of all Time

Day 2 – Glory

I have to admit at the beginning of the article today that I am a Civil War fan.  This isn’t to say that I am a fan of war.  And this isn’t to say that I think even what we consider to be just wars are good.  War is a terrible thing, even when they are done for the best of reasons.  War should never be a first response.  It should only be the response when all other options seem to have failed us.  I am also not the kind of person who has gone to Civil War Reenactments, or any reenactment for that matter.  While I do think dressing up in period costume is cool, I am not always sure of the purpose of the people putting them on, unless for historical study. 

But I have been a kind of Civil War history nut since I was 10 years old.  When I was 10 I went to the school library and picked up a large history book of the Civil War.  It contained information on each and every battle, troupe movements, and the generals who were in command.  It put each battle in context of the larger civil war itself.  I was enthralled.  I wanted to learn each and every thing I could about the era as possible.  From the History of Slavery, to the onset of the Civil War, to the Emancipation Proclamation and beyond.  I wanted to learn it all.  And when I was 10 I knew just about as much as any 10 year old possibly could about the War Between the States.

Obviously it’s been over 30 years since then, and as anyone who has watched the game show Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader can attest, we forget a lot in the intervening time period.  I could tell you a little bit about some of the major Generals and their history.  And Ken Burn’s documentary on the Civil War helped me recall some of the names and faces of the major players involved in the conflict, but nothing can match the knowledge I had at 10 years old.  Suffice it to say, I have known a lot, and forgot a lot in the interim. 

So when I was a sophomore in high school and a friend mentioned to me about a Civil War movie coming out, I was excited.  But I had one major hurdle to cross.  I know for some of you out there, you won’t understand this, but for those who do, I was not able to watch rated R films at that time.  I couldn’t just walk into a movie and watch one.  I know some of my friends who could pass for 17, but I could not.  It just so happens that I lucked out when my parents had been told by people that they trusted at their church that there was an amazing Civil War movie out that had really nothing wrong with it except some accurate depictions of violence in war.  That convinced my parents to allow us to go, albeit with them in the audience.  So I remember sitting back for my first R rated movie, and a Civil War movie at that, excited to there for the show.

If I was worried or not, I did not have any reasons to be.  The Cast was high powered, although I would say that at the time they weren’t necessarily all that well known.  And those who were did not necessarily have the type of resume that you would think warrant a big screen historical epic of that magnitude.  First there was Matthew Broderick, probably the primary male lead of the piece.  He was best known for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  And he had done some musical theater as well.  While I enjoyed Ferris immensely, being one of the quintessential 80's movies dealing with uniquely first world problems of teen angst, I would never have said that he would have had the capacity for such a dramatic effort.  Then there was Cary Elwes, he of an amazing romantic comedy, The Princess Bride, that was a kind of sweeping epic, but more on the comedy end of the spectrum.  He had done some other minor work previously but nothing with the depth of Glory in mind, and nothing that I had seen.  Of course there was Morgan Freeman, which if you have read my previous piece on Shawshank Redemption will note that he did have some movie background, specifically Lean on Me up to that point.  And he had made Driving Miss Daisy, which had come out that same year.  But aside from that, he just had a ton of TV work that he had been involved with.  I remembered him from the Electric Company, which I occasionally watched as a child.  I had seen Lean on Me, and that made me hopeful, but that was about it.  Denzel Washington, who would earn an academy award for his performance, had been in mostly TV work with the exception of Cry Freedom (also nominated), which I wouldn’t watch until after I had seen Glory.  He was definitely a promising actor but nothing would prepare me for his role of Private Trip.  And there were tons of smaller roles as well.  From the Irish Drill Sergeant to Andre Braugher, as Thomas Searles, one of Robert Shaw’s close African-American friends who would join the first African American regiment, to Bob Gunton’s portrayal of General Garrsion Harker, as a conniving war profiteer, the roles were plentiful and amazingly well written.  I could go on and on.

Freddy Francis, the cinematographer of Glory, had done some amazing work in black and white on The Elephant Man, and had done some rich work in otherworldly lands, working with David Lynch once again, in Dune.  These experiences would serve him well in Glory, dealing with both intimate moments, which would capture the men dealing with private reflections or the singing of the men before a battle, to more wide sweeping moments, such as Robert Shaw setting his horse free and walking through his men out to the front of the lines before the battle.  He was able to capture beautifully the chaos of war, and at the same time preserve the humanity of each individual soldier involved. 

Ed Zwick up to this point in time had done mostly TV work, with the exception of the film About Last Night, which in no ways would lead one to believe what he would be able to do here.  With Glory, Zwick was able to tell a sweeping tale of the first African American Regiment to see battle during the Civil War.  With his deft directing and Kevin Jarre’s brilliant screenplay, Zwick was beautifully able to display the chaos and riggers of war with an initial battle where Shaw seems to be utterly lost in the midst of everything going on.  And from there he was able to develop the characters of the men who would ultimately lead this regiment into battle, as well as the men themselves.  From small moments of watching the doctors treat Private Trip’s (Denzel Washington’s) back as a result of being whipped for deserting his post, to larger grandiose moments where the soldiers, and later Shaw himself, refuse to take their pay because they were being underpaid just because they were black, Zwick develops these characters so that when they go into battle that we actually care about them.  He then ably moves the unit through early battles and through dealing with being misused to see the growth of the unit and them seeing each other as brothers as they are about to go off into the final battle.  Finally Zwick leads us through a final battle, with James Horner’s operatic score playing in the background, showing both the beauty of a unit moving as one cause to one purpose and the tragedy of losing these men for a battle that day they would eventually lose.

But the beauty of Glory and telling the story of all of these individual men and their heroic efforts during the Civil War is not in the fact that most of them would die in battle and never live to see what happened.  The beauty of these men was in rallying others to join their cause and come after them to fight a war that would earn them their recognition as human beings worthy of the same rights as others, and not as pieces of property.  The ran the risk of certain death by a bullet or even being captured, because the south announced they would execute any black man in a Union military uniform, or any white men who was leading said unit.  They were heroes.  Lincoln believed that the black soldiers were responsible for turning the tide of the war in their favor.

So why is Glory in my top 5 movies of all time?  I think you could run down the list.  From the amazing writing and direction, to the incredible portrayal of these men, none of which you feel like you don’t know or are rooting for by the time they get to the final battle, to the beautiful cinematography, I find myself enraptured in the piece every time I sit down to watch it.  There are some movies that I can watch multiple times.  But there are very few that every time I see it on I will stop and sit and watch all the way to the end.  Glory is just one of those films.  It’s a beautifully told historical epic.

This film is perfectly toasty

Five Stars


*Up Next in the Top 5 Casablanca*