Glory

Glory (1989) is about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, raised during the Civil War. It was one of the Union's first Black regiments, commanded by a white officer of twenty five. The film follows it from training to the assault on Fort Wagner. Its subject is not war but inequality. The regiment is put to labour without weapons, its men are offered less pay than white soldiers, and they refuse as a body, accepting no pay at all. That happened. Edward Zwick directed. Matthew Broderick plays the commander Robert Gould Shaw, Denzel Washington plays the escaped slave Trip, and Morgan Freeman plays the sergeant. Washington won his first Oscar for it, for Best Supporting Actor. The film took three awards in total, including cinematography and sound. Most of the soldiers went unnamed in the records, and the film uses invented characters to fill that gap; Shaw's letters, on the other hand, are real and form the spine of the screenplay. It runs 122 minutes. Good for: Civil War history, military drama, and the arrival of Denzel Washington. Less good for: the story is still told through a white officer's eyes and the Black soldiers get limited interior life. The battle scenes are bloody. The emotional shape of the ending presents the outcome as a victory; the assault in fact failed.