Product Description
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The heart-stopping story of the first black regiment to fight
for the North in the Civil War, GLORY stars Matthew Broderick,
Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes and Morgan Freeman. Broderick and
Elwes are the idealistic young Bostonians who lead the regiment;
Freeman is the inspirational sergeant who unites the troops; and
Denzel Washington, in an O(r) - winning performance (1989,
Best Supporting Actor), is the runaway slave who embodies the
indomitable spirit of the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts.
.co.uk Review
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"The negroes fought gallantly and were headed by as brave a
Colonel as ever lived", was one Confederate soldier's eyewitness
verdict on the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers immediately after
247 of their 600-man regiment had fallen in bloody swathes
beneath the withering fire from Fort Wagner near Charleston,
South Carolina in 1863. Glory is their story: the mustering of
the first black regiment in the US Army, their battles with the
Southerners as well as with the Northern authorities,
and their own moment of glory when they paid a terrible price for
the rtunity to demonstrate to the world their courage. In
telling this little-known story, director Ed Zwick
single-handedly changed perceptions of the American Civil War:
when a Grand Review of the Armies was held in Washington at the
end of the war, none of the almost 180,000 coloured troops who
fought for the Union were present; when that parade was restaged
in 1990 a year after the movie was released, the 54th
Massachusetts re-enactors were at the front of the procession.
Zwick's stirring, factually accurate account is greatly enhanced
by obsessive period detail and frighteningly realistic battle
reconstructions (which were not to be surpassed in scale until
1993's Gettysburg). But Zwick also illuminates individual
characters in the regiment with great sensitivity. As crucial as
the set-pieces are the scenes of the men together:
talking in the tent or baring their souls in song. Denzel
Washington, as the embittered ex-slave, gives a performance of
real depth; he richly deserved his O win for the
heartbreaking flogging scene alone. Morgan Freeman brings great
gravitas to his paternalistic role, and Matthew Broderick's
idealistic Colonel Shaw is the centre around which the story
revolves. With a clutch of remarkable lead performances, a
sensitive and touching script, one of James Horner's finest
musical scores, and a director with both the vision and heart to
pull it off it's easy to agree with the backcover blurb: "Glory
is one of the greatest war movies ever made". Without even a hint
of hyperbole, it undoubtedly is.
On the DVD: This is a superb looking (anamorphic) and sounding
(Dolby 5.1) print, and the disc has some excellent additional
features. Ed Zwick's commentary is inful and extremely
detailed: here's a director who obviously cares deeply about this
movie. Of the three featurettes, one is a short-ish promo piece
but the other two are genuinely impressive: there's a 20-minute
"Making of" feature with major contributions from Zwick, Freeman
and Broderick, and best of all a 45-minute "The True Story
Continues" feature narrated by Freeman which tells the complete
story of the 54th Massachusetts from beginning to end using
footage from the movie as well as archive material and film of
battle re-enactments. Also included are two deleted scenes,
although a third scene which was for the movie but not used
(the Frederick Douglass' speech) crops up in the "True Story"
piece. James Horner's emotive score gets an isolated track all to
itself and there are also some filmographies and trailers. All in
all, this is a superb DVD. --Mark Walker