On April 25, 1990 the remarkable film "Glory" by Edward Zwick was released, which told the story of the first regiment of black soldiers during the American Civil War. A film whose filming also awakened the old demons of slavery ...
Columbia TriStar
Just 30 years ago, on April 25, 1990, Edward Zwick's superb film Glory was released on our screens. Set during the Civil War in 1863, the film told the story of Robert Gould Shaw, promoted to colonel of the first regiment of black soldiers, volunteers in a war they believed to be their own, in these times of struggle for the abolition of slavery. Assigned to subordinate tasks, despised by their officers, these soldiers rebelled, Shaw at their head, to go to the fire.
If the work of Zwick unfortunately did not meet the heights of the Box Office in France, by attracting only a little over 162,000 spectators, it was not a triumph at the World Box Office either, having reported just over $ 26 million. A cruel injustice for a powerful work. Sumptuously photographed by veteran and immense director of photography Freddie Francis, rightly rewarded by an Oscar for his work, the film is also carried by a magnificent range of actors: Matthew Broderick in the title role, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman, and Denzel Washington. In the guise of the rebel soldier Trip, the latter also delivers a memorable composition here, praised by the Oscar for Best Supporting Role.
The awakening of old demons
In a mixture of shame and guilt, in the shadow of the Founding Fathers of Independence and the American Constitution, twelve of whom made slaves work on their plantations, the United States still finds it difficult to evoke the subject of slavery. Even if one should not hide the fact that many artists preferred to privilege the history of Segregation and Civil Rights, treated many times in the cinema like Mississippi Burning or Malcolm X. Why? Because the end of slavery did not lead to real equality, and it was not until the early sixties (of the twentieth century) that this equality emerged, with the highlight great March to Washington for work and freedom led by Martin Luther King in 1963, and the signing of Civil Rights Act in 1964.
A machine for making myths and often quick to construct an idealized past from scratch, Hollywood is (was?) Capable of producing sufficiently strong works around the subject, even if they are more often than not careful and academic. In Glory, which tells the story of the 54th Black Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War, this past suddenly returned to the throat of the film crew during filming in the state of Georgia.
It was during the filming of the famous sequence where Denzel Washington suffered the terrible humiliation of being whipped in front of the whole regiment that the past resurfaced. A very tense scene to shoot. "The experts told us that when you entered these camps, you sometimes saw guys tied to wheels. It was their punishment. We tied you up, we whipped you, and we left you there. Nothing to do with color , it was a military punishment " explained Morgan Freeman.
"Whipping a man in Georgia, where so many others had been whipped before, woke up demons" explained Edward Zwick; "I didn't really know what it was going to look like. I looked with the prop for a way to do the scene. He had a leather strap on which he put some color to make it look like blood. said, "It will sting a bit, but it won't hurt." And Denzel, who on such a day is ready for anything and gets into the character, didn't want to talk about it. I felt something Denzel didn't want to explore, and it was the deepest humiliation, the theft of his dignity. I told the operator to put a 300m reel on the camera, and I said the chief operator not to stop, I let it run, until Denzel got there. What he discovered was the loss of control. And what ensues is one of the strongest moments that I saw in the cinema. "
Below, the scene in question, of a terrible and poignant intensity ...
Little more history lessons
Beyond the intrinsic and obvious qualities of the film, Glory is not free from historical errors. Because if the cinema delivers above all works of fiction which must be considered as such, the films often take liberties with the historical facts, for narrative reasons, for the sake of tightening an intrigue, the will not to lose the spectators in road, etc ...
Although the film's script is based on the work of screenwriter Kevin Jarre, as well as the respective works of Lincoln Kirstein and Peter Burchard, Glory also draws heavily on the letters written by Robert Gould Shaw, which are treasured in the library Harvard, Boston. They nevertheless show that Robert Shaw was long skeptical of the idea of commanding black troops, and that the myth surrounding the character and the story as presented in Edward Zwick's film exaggerated his zeal and dedication to the cause. abolitionist, even if it was very real.
In addition, the film shows the volunteers engaged in the 54th infantry regiment training during the Christmas period 1862, after the terrible battle of Antietam fought in September of the same year. In fact, the real regiment of the 54th was not set up until March 1863, and it was engaged in its first combat during the battle of James Island in South Carolina, July 16, 1863. The battle fought at Fort Wagner, and final battle of the film, took place on July 18, 1863. The regiment fought three more important fights: Olustee, Florida, February 20, 1864; Honey hill in South Carolina, November 30, 1864; and finally Boykin's mill, still in South Carolina, April 18, 1865.
We end with a touch of anachronism. First about the character of General Charles Garrison Harker, played by Bob Gunton. In the chronology of events, this character was not present in South Carolina when the 54th Massachusetts Regiment was on the scene. Harker was in the Cumberland Corps, which was in Tennessee at the time. In addition, he was only 25 years old, whereas Gunton was 44 at the time of the shooting of the film.
Have you ever seen the movie "Glory"? Note it!
