If a moviegoer saw only the first few moments of Glory, he might be forgiven for believing that it is a film about war. The opening scenes from the Civil War's bloodiest single day of battle at Antietam are presented in the shockingly graphic idiom of contemporary tastes. Yet, they are reminiscent of the epics that Hollywood produced when both war and the movies still basked in the sunshine of America's romantic imagination.
It is a juxtaposition of taste and feeling that announces the special quality of this film - one that, while faithfully reproducing time, place, and circumstance, dares look into the somber heart of war for the essential human qualities that transcend them. Like the Laocoon, the film captures and episode of infinite pathos and perishable nobility in a form that deserves to last forever.
Glory is the story of a people's heroism, as seen in the life of one individual. It is a story of individual heroism drawn from a historic moment in the life of an enslaved people. But unlike films that merely etch the surface of courage, it allows us to catch a glimpse of the immortal spirit that makes it possible.
That glimpse is part of what allows Glory to transcend the harsh realities of racial oppression and prejudice it must inevitably portray. Though blacks have served and died honorably in all of America's wars - stating with the Revolution - in each one racism has demanded fresh proof that they could offer a worthy sacrifice. During the Civil War, this was especially important, since one of the premises that allowed the defenders of slavery to claim that they were nonetheless true Americans was the idea that blacks could, therefore, be bought and sold as cattel without violating America's liberal democratic creed. In an era when people often regarded manliness and humanity as the same, the highest proof of humanity within the reach of most men was the courage to fight and die in defense of one's people, home, and country.
The antislavery Unionists, including Frederick Douglass, who pushed for the organization of a black combat regiment, acted on this logic. If blacks fought and died in the war to preserve the Union, they would prove, beyond doubt, that it was rightly a war to end slavery as well. There could be no better way symbolically and actually to merge the political aim and moral purpose of the struggle.
But the high-minded people who pushed for the idea were not the ones suited to carry it out in fact. Black men had to come forward willing to accept the merciless discipline of war. And, given the prejudices of the time, white officers had to be found who, despite those prejudices, would have for black manhood enough respect to impose that discipline upon them. As Glory rightly makes clear, the first requirement was easily met. Free blacks and runaway slaves burned with the desire to fight - to strike out for freedom and against power that still held their people in bondage.
In the contrast between Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher), an educated Massachusetts-bred free black, and an illiterate, rebellious runaway slave (Denzel Washington), Glory conveys the fact that this desire ultimately overcame divisions of class and background. Such divisions at first threaten to provoke a bitter fight between the two. The spirited anger both feel against the oppression that, in different ways, each has
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