I’m not sure there’s a decade that’s more obviously itself than the 1980s. When you consume media from that time — movies, shows, music videos, ads — you’re very much aware that you’re watching something from the 80s. That’s true for other decades, to be sure, just not to the extent that it is for such an over-the-top, proudly-itself ten year period.
If something is “80s,” it’s probably exceedingly noisy, infectiously energetic, cocaine, shamelessly saccharine, cocaine, heavily sound-tracked, cocaine, and, of course, cocaine. And part of the issue with an era being easily definable is that a lot of the media that comes out during it — especially movies — stays very much of that time as opposed to standing the test of it. Sometimes that’s to the movie, show, or song’s benefit; in most cases, it’s to the content’s detriment.
There are classics from any generation, however, and the 80s has more than its fair share of those: Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Tootsie, I could go on. The one I want to discuss today is not quite as well-known as those timeless films, but it belongs in any discussion about not only great war movies (more on that in a minute), but also great movies in general: Glory.
This 1989 dandy is an American Civil War tale about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment — the second and perhaps most famous all-African American division of soldiers. The movie has a lot of things going for it, but the first one to note is that it has Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington together. Think about that. Two of the most famous actors ever are in a war movie where they share multiple electric scenes, and yet Glory isn’t really anywhere near most people’s minds when they think of famous war movies.
That list probably goes something like Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Full Metal Jacket, Paths of Glory/Bridge on the River Kwai (for the old heads), Dunkirk/1917 (for the recency biased), Platoon/Patton (for the enjoyers of similar looking words next to each other), and Black Hawk Down (for me). There are many others I missed, but then that’s the point — you can name a lot of war movies before mentioning Glory.
Shoot, you can name multiple Edward Zwick war movies before you get to his sophomore film. The prolific director went on to helm Legends of the Fall and The Last Samurai, part of a splendid career in visual storytelling that includes producer credits for Shakespeare in Love and Traffic.
Despite this impressive filmography, Zwick doesn’t necessarily get the acclaim he deserves, probably because his movies are more straightforward and loud than those of Jenkins, PTA, Gerwig, Lynch, Del Toro, or the Cohen brothers, to name a few of the game’s best. But Zwick is a master action director who tells a great story, even if all his films have an 80s tinge to them. By my estimate — and knowing full well this is not consensus — Glory is his opus.
And Zwick being the director of Glory is fitting. While both have Oscars to their name and are obviously respected, filmmaker and film should probably get a little bit more love. Glory is not a perfect movie, to be clear — it has the standard number of historical errors that films so often can’t seem to avoid, for one. But it is an earnestly documented, inspired-by-true-events tale with a supremely deep cast and knowledgeable script that brings compelling and complex characters to life.
As a way to dive into the movie, I want to start by noting some of its main criticisms. The most notable came from the legendary critic Roger Ebert, who wondered aloud at the time why the story was told from the vantage point of a white officer as opposed to those of the African American soldiers. Frankly, that sentiment was way ahead of its time, to the point where it still flies over far too many heads today.
Plus, it’s a completely fair take. In fact, someone could absolutely update this movie to make it more historically accurate and, most importantly, tell it mainly from the Black perspective. People would watch that. Anyway, I’d still say that the original spends a lot of time with the Black troops, gives each character (race aside) the chance to be smart, contributive, funny, and/or insightful, and features numerous shots of an entire company’s worth of Black actors portraying the day-in, day-out grind of military training.
Those are paying jobs for real people who got to be a part of something very personal and, one would imagine, special. And they’re not just around to be bodies on set. There are a plethora of small but impactful speaking roles within the regiment, and these people make you feel like you’re going through this wartime experience with dozens of soldiers, not just Freeman, Washington, and their bunkmates.
So yes, the next Glory should probably be told from the point of view of Andre Braugher’s free Black soldier or multiple enlistees, since most of the 54th Massachusetts was made up of free Northern men like Fredrick Douglass’ sons, not emancipated and runaway slaves as the movie implies. But the ’89 vintage doesn’t suffer from being told through Matthew Broderick’s Robert Gould Shaw.
Speaking of, the other well-known criticism of Glory is the casting of Broderick, then (as now) high-pitched and baby-faced, but also 27 and just three years removed from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, as Col. Shaw. It’s difficult today to imagine Broderick, a fantastic and accomplished actor, as anything but Ferris Bueller; imagine having to do it a few years after he played hooky from high school. And not only is the role of Shaw a departure from Ferris, the story is in a completely different time period. Some viewers must’ve been immediately taken out of Glory when they saw that lovable prankster acting stern and authoritative whilst in Civil War attire — or put off entirely.
Listen, I get it. Broderick in the role doesn’t work for everyone. But I’d venture to say he’s the perfect choice — Shaw was 24 when he enlisted and 26 when he died; Broderick was 26 during filming. Do we really think Shaw, who isn’t Broderick’s doppelgänger but does kind of look like him, had some imposing figure, booming voice, and aura of invincibility as the privileged 20-something child of literati parents?
Were we actually hoping for, say, Bruce Willis or Kevin Costner, both 33 at the time, to play this part? What about Johnny Depp, then 26? Broderick may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and it’s certainly not the movie’s best performance, but he rides that New England accent — Shaw was the son of Boston abolitionists — through a performance where he and his character seem to earn their stripes simultaneously.
Now for the inaccuracies. The 54th was mostly free men, as we noted, and the soldiers never march barefoot in cold mud, as per the film. Those are big. In fact, it doesn’t appear that the Union brass withheld shoes or uniforms from the regiment, the effects of which the movie spends a lot of time covering. That’s one of the most glaring issues with Glory, and it’s definitely to its detriment.
There are also a few chronological and logistical errors — the 54th actually went the other direction, south to north with the ocean on the right, during its attack on Fort Wagner, for example — but nothing is quite egregious enough to ruin the movie. In fact, what I’d consider a major historical issue with the film ended up being one of its most iconic moments.
Denzel Washington won his first Oscar for his portrayal of Private Trip, a runaway slave whose abrasive demeanor frequently irritates and provokes his fellow soldiers. His insubordination also gets him into trouble with the commanding officers. One night, he flees camp, only to be caught soon after, paraded through the troops with his hands tied behind his back, and whipped in full view of everyone. Though Shaw later finds out that Trip only ran away to try and get some shoes, the private gets his lashes anyway.
Washington brought home gold primarily because of this scene. The way he struts defiantly through the crowd of soldiers as he’s marched to his punishment is delectably Denzel, that cocky charisma sprinkled into this and every role. As Trip readies an already-lacerated back in preparation for his penance, as he’s whipped by an officer who’d previously racially abused him, he stares straight into the eyes of Col. Shaw, not once breaking his gaze even as the lash’s unceasing pain forces a single tear, and then a few more, down his cheek.
You can see the tear welling up in Washington’s right eye, and the late James Horner’s score helps hit the perfect all-around crescendo. All those years of bondage and inhuman treatment, all those ghastly marks from all those whippings — even after escaping slavery and getting to fight for his freedom, Washington’s Trip is forced to endure more mistreatment from white men. Same as it ever was.
Though Cary Elwes’ incredibly progressive Maj. Cabot Forbes dissents and publicly chastises Shaw for even thinking about whipping a former slave, the colonel not only goes through with it, he matches Trip’s gaze as the skin-splitting thwack of the lash rips up the private’s back. From context to buildup to culmination — and accompanied by some arresting music — it’s an incredibly powerful scene.
One problem: there’s no way that event could ever take place. Flogging was abolished by the U.S. Army in 1861, two years before the 54th was formed. But, again, the way the whole thing plays out, it’s one of those deals where you shrug and go “it’s the movies.” You pay to watch Denzel Washington bottle up all that emotion and drip feed it into your soul. If one of your bigger historical misstatements turns out to be an award-winning filmmaking tour-de-force, you’re doing alright.
Glory also has its moments of 80s-ness, laying it on thick in some places and featuring numerous close-ups of screaming people in others. The scene where Col. Shaw rips up his paycheck in solidarity with the Black troops — who were to be paid ten dollars a month instead of the standard 13 — is straight cheese, but you’ve bought in enough by that point to go with it and cheer alongside Freeman’s Sgt. Major John Rawlins and the rest of the regiment.
Those who went into the movie expecting rousing battle scenes throughout were probably disappointed. Glory starts by showing Shaw surviving the especially bloody Battle of Antietam and obviously ends with the suicide mission that is Fort Wagner. In between is another battle scene, which comes shortly before that fateful charge up the beach. But there’s a lot of talking, back-room politics, and training sequences during the film. That’s not going to do it for some people, but it’s one of the things Glory gets right. War is a lot of sitting around punctured by terrifying bouts of close range firefights, a fact that transcends era.
And Zwick knows what he’s got in this cast. He allows his actors to cook and lets us spend a lot of the characters’ down time with them. Instead of only going for big, sweeping scenes that are more for the director than the actors, Zwick brings us ground level to this one regiment, telling the little story amidst the big by documenting the 54th’s journey, however out of order it might be.
I’m not going to discuss the good and bad with the late writer Shelby Foote, but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who spent more time studying and writing about the Civil War. Foote served as a consultant for Glory, and I’d have to imagine his presence helped give the script and settings their authentic feel. The way these characters talk — all of them — sounds like how people spoke back then. They speak and act like they’re in the 1860s and you want to hear and see more from them, which you couldn’t really do if the movie was mostly fighting.
To top it off, the best part of the movie isn’t even a battle scene, though it is battle adjacent. It’s the night before Fort Wagner, and while it begins with Shaw and Forbes listening in to what we end up seeing, the scene spends most of its time with the Black soldiers singing around a campfire. It’s essentially the last night on earth for the entire 54th and the men are doing one of the few things that any human who has ever existed can relate to: sharing stories with your community — your family — around a source of warmth and light. I can’t think of a better way to send yourself off into the great beyond.
The singing is hypnotic, the confessionals are cathartic, and somehow — in 1860s America while fighting their ultimate, age-old oppressor — these men have hope. Not for themselves, necessarily; hope for their next of kin, and their next of kin’s next of kin. They have hope because they finally, for the first time in their lives, have agency over where their future lies. They can literally fight for a better tomorrow.
Not long before the campfire scene, and just after the 54th’s first time in action (a decisive victory), Trip and Shaw have a private discussion about, well, the way it is. Trip may be an insubordinate, but he’s no dummy — he knows his life isn’t going to get much better even if the Union wins the war, if it ever does. It’s a dirty game, this whole thing, this whole country, and Trip gets it. So does Shaw.
“It stinks, I suppose,” Shaw muses coldly, a sensitive abolitionist turned hardened Colonel.
“Stinks bad,” Trip continues, never one to mince his words. “And we all covered up in it too, I mean ain’t nobody clean.”
Trip pauses slightly before softening his voice.
“Be nice to get clean, though.”
“How do we do that?”
“We ante up and kick in like men, sir. But I still won’t carry your flag.”
The next scene, Shaw — after basically being told that charging up Fort Wagner is a death wish — proudly and unblinkingly volunteers his unit as the lead regiment. The 54th are to be the sacrificial battering rams in the hopes that the Union can overwhelm the South Carolina fort and cut off a key supply of resources to a soon-to-be failed nation. The Confederacy was buckling, and the Union wanted to hack at its knees.
As we learn after a soul-stirring (and very 80s) battle scene, it didn’t happen. The Confederacy ended up losing the war, but not that fort; it was too entrenched in the sand and well-stocked with men and ammunition. To boot, the only footpath to the fort was a steep sandy hill that served as the barrel to the 54th’s fish, though many brave men breached Wagner and set foot in it anyway, if only for a short time.
But that’s not the point at all. Well, the way the 54th was slaughtered isn’t the point. It’s that there can’t be a more appropriate regiment to make such a courageous sacrifice, at least the way the movie sets it up. Frustratingly, one of the Glory’s key inaccuracies — that the 54th was comprised mostly of runaway or former slaves, when it was predominantly lifelong free Black men who filed the ranks — somewhat dulls the meaning of the act.
What Glory shows us is a group of men who, by and large, have experienced a life of bondage. The film mostly depicts people who have very little to lose and would rather die altruistically than try to scrap out a living in an unknown world. And that’s its own kind of awe-inspiring, albeit a falsehood as it relates to the 54th Massachusetts. Through Braugher’s Cpl. Thomas Searles, we get a nod to the kind of free Black man strikingly fearless and righteous enough to leave a life of comfort in the North and put his life on the line for his fellow Black person down South.
That individual, with everything to lose, is willing to give it all up in the hopes that his sacrifice means people who look like him anywhere in the country will have a better tomorrow? That’s the individual I want to watch, the person I want to learn about, the human whose perspective most interests me. Don’t get me wrong, the way Glory goes about telling this story definitely isn’t incorrect in a general, Civil War sense — plenty of runaway slaves fought against the Confederacy — and the film certainly hits many of the right cinematic and emotional notes. But it’s unmistakably different than what transpired with the 54th Massachusetts.
One thing the movie shows perfectly, however, is Fort Wagner’s aftermath, chiefly the way the Confederate soldiers dump Shaw’s corpse into a mass grave filled with the Colonel’s troops. Usually, the bodies of men killed in battle get shipped home to their families, but Black soldiers — and their commanding officers — were tossed namelessly alongside one another into hastily dug pits.
Upon hearing of this war crime, Col. Shaw’s wealthy abolitionist father Frank said, “we can imagine no holier place than that in which he lies.” The Shaws and their friends believed it was an honor for Robert to be buried next to the soldiers with whom he died. In ending the movie by showing Col. Shaw’s body resting adjacent to Private Trip — who was gunned down while holding up the same American flag he said he’d never carry in battle for Shaw — Glory puts the best possible finishing touch on a lovely and deeply affecting movie.
That ending, by the way, needed to be shown, if only to remind everyone that people from all backgrounds made sacrifices in the name of basic decency during America’s greatest internal conflict. We should see Col. Shaw’s story and learn about his journey from sheltered schoolboy to decorated war hero, even if the overall vantage point doesn’t have to belong to him.
Morgan Freeman, in responding to criticisms about the film’s narrative lens, said Shaw and the 54th are inseparable, and he’s right on the money because what makes this movie a truly American story is that inseparability. Black people and white people are forever intertwined in his country, for better or (mainly) worse.
Learning that history, which is mostly ugly but features a few shining moments like the 54th’s, is imperative. And Glory, aside from being a great watch, is a terrific way to do so.
The Canon 
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