Customer Reviews

Glory Guys [VHS]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Tom Tryon portrays a concerned cavalry officer attempting to whip his company of raw immigrant recruits into fighting shape on the western frontier. Simultaneously carrying on a love triangle with Senta Berger and her new flame, his scout. His commanding officer carries a grudge held over since the Civil War which clouds his judgement. In Reno/Custer like fashion, Tom Tryon and his company are sent to reconoiter while the General leads the remainder of the command to their deaths. Great battle scenes and rousing moments of espirit d'accord(sp). For those who like westerns, cavalry, and Custer.

The only bad thing about this video is that it is not a director's cut! I remember a little more detail from the original release in theaters. An outstanding western and cavalry movie. It makes subtile use of real history. The relationship between Tom Tryon's character and Andrew Duggan's character mirrors the real life Custer versus Reno/Benteen friction. The battle scene fairly closely follows Reno's portion of Custer's disasterous engagement in 1876. Also note James Caan as the Irish recruit. Lots of low key humor is included, especially Tom Tryon's and Harve Presnell's fight scene. Maybe someday a DVD Director's Cut? I can only hope.

Just a great cavalry/Indian film.A cast of thousands make this a movie one they just can't afford to make in todays market.Very good cavalry evolutions,and equipment.Based very losely on the 1876 Custer battle,and the Reno part of the engagement.Good character build up with some great lines from the chief scout,Harvey Presnell."Drink deep,ride hard.Don't look over the horizon,thats the Lord,s business." "Son of the morning Star",has more acurate uniforms and equipment,and ranks also as the best Custer movie.I would reccommend both films.

This movie is one i have been waiting for a long time and i am so happy to add it to my collection of over 900 hundred dvds THE GLORY GUYS is one of the best action pack westerns in the top 10 a great cast and vary well derected a good location and good cinematography. TOM TRYON was a great actor and i always enjoyed seeing him in his movies sorry he had to leave us so early .

This is a great film though not as violent as a standard Sam Peckinpah film. Shown with parts deleted on TV, the current video release is the complete film, though not on widescreen. The filming is lavish and the soundtrack inspiring. Though loosely based on the Custer debacle the film is strong on character development and has an impressive (Peckinpah favorites) cast (watch for a very young Wayne Rogers).

Hopefully it will be remastered, in widescreen and have an isolated musical score as the sountrack may not have ever been published. The upcoming DVD of "Von Ryan's Express" will have this isolated music score so lets hope this will be included too.

Definite 5 Star, lots of action but without the graphic violence of other Peckinpah films. Tom Tryon shines in this film as does James Caan and Andrew Duggan.

A good, solid western. The movie does spend alot of time showcasing calvary life, but, does come to an action packed finale. MGM should be commended for bringing movies like this to DVD thru their MOD program. Hopefully we'll see more westerns in the future from the vaults.

...I was thrilled to see that this film was available on DVD... but nervous at seeing "Morgan J. Freeman" listed as the director...(instead of Arnold Laven) Made me wonder... Only the fact that I was buying through Amazon made me go ahead and order.

...Advertised as "letterbox..." I got DVD and the "jacket" said "FULL SCREEN"... Well, don't worry... it IS in "LETTERBOX..." Disc is "bare bones..." Absolutely no special features... not even scene selection. You put in disc and movie runs... when done... runs again.

...Copy seems decent enough... especially the color... which has faded badly on the copies shown on TV... I last saw this film in widescreen at a theater in 1965 on a date... It has been shown on TV only rarely... I have had the opportunity three times in all these years (oddly, most recently the day before the DVD arrived) So a joy to see again in letterbox... with very good color... Scenes often missing in TV showings (training ride, soldier missing saloon fight) have been restored... and the sound quality is very good.

...As to the film itself... Would have been better if Sam Peckinpaw had directed rather than just written the screenplay (from Hoffman Birney's DICE OF GOD...) TWO romances to bog down the plot rather than just one... Seemingly unavoidable "bust up the saloon scene..."

...Having said that... a large part of the film is definitely amazing. The all time best wide screen cavalry vs Indians battle (and deployment to battle) to ever grace the screen. It has been many years since studios could afford this scale (until computer augmentation arrived...)

...The Glory Guys (unfortunate title) is a thinly veiled retelling of the Custer at the Little Bighorn story. For the most part, the terrain is hauntingly similar to Fort Abraham Lincoln area (except bluffs in distance) and the Little Bighorn itself... Quite a feat since filming took place in Durango, Mexico... 1500 miles south of the actual location (once in a while a tall cactus type plant only found from the Sonora on south pops up...)

...Riz Ortolani's (theme from Mondo Cane, etc) hard driving score matches the large scale action. More than 600 extras make the epic battle scenes memorable (wasted if not in widescreen). The cast is excellent... including newcomers, James Caan and Wayne Rogers. Harve Presnell (General Marshall in Saving Private Ryan) shows fine acting skills so rarely used (he was famous in musicals)

...Technical details not bad... such as showing the need to space out shots in four second intervals with 45.55 cavalry carbines... to avoid jamming. And critical fact that wearing out cavalry remounts in the days leading up to battle makes any retreat costly... Weakness of cavalry holding ground clearly shown... Horses to the rear... every 4th man horseholder... 25% of firepower immediately missing from the line.

...Commanding officer of regiment shown as Major General... In reality, at best would have been full colonel... (The actual commanding officer of 7th Cavalry, a full colonel, was gone for years on detached duty) and while a Brevet Major General from the Civil War... Custer was serving as a Lt. Colonel... though addressed by most of his officers as "General..." a courtesy that his brevet warrented...

...Tom Tryon's Captain Demas is a thinly disguised Captain Benteen, one of the finest company commanders in the 19th Century U.S. Army. Major "Marcus" stands in for Major Marcus Reno... an officer whose troops only survived because of Benteen having put backbone in their defense of the bluffs.

...Historically there is no proof that Custer wanted Benteen and Reno dead... (though Reno might well have thought so when Custer's promise of support proved worthless), a major plot item in the film, but they hated him and at best he wanted them away from as much glory as possible. Wishbone Creek mentioned in the film stands in for troops left to die at the Washita River by Custer... an action that turned half of his officers against him.

...There is no doubt that this is a flawed film; but where it shines... it glistens.

Y.P.

I remember seeing "The Glory Guys" on TV on a Saturday afternoon or two as a child; as something of a student of the era -- I was the kid who read the Time-Life books on the Old West and made a diorama of Custer's Last Stand for a school project -- I thought the film better than some, presenting images that rather faithfully reproduced what I'd seen in those pages, mostly the incredible paintings of Remington and Shreyvogel. But I also remember being somewhat bored by it, turned off by Tom Tryon's and Harve Presnell's wooden acting and a story that seemed to be taking quite a while to get to the inevitable battle. Watching it again 20 years later, and seeing it in widescreen, makes me appreciate the film more, though it isn't a perfect movie by any stretch. A fictionalized but thinly veiled accounting of the events leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Sam Peckinpah-penned horse opera works best when it focuses on the mundaneities of a soldier's life in the era, as well as the desire to stay alive more than to ride into glory through a desperate, romanticized charge. These moments -- including the fresh recruits being turned into soldiers under the fatherly tutelege of a sargeant (Slim Pickens -- how can you go wrong with him in this role?), a boisterous night on the town, and a young private's sneaking off base to meet with a girl he loves -- position "The Glory Guys" as a better film about the military than most. But the so-so romantic triangle between Tryon, Presnell, and the lovely Senta Berger vacillates between being charming in a funny way (a fight scene with some good visual gags) and just plain tedious, as no one seems to have any sparks or interest in the other. Tryon tries, but he's better when giving orders; his cypher-like expressions and low tones actually give the generally excellent military moments a documentary feel, blunted a bit by an over-the-top presentation of a by-the-book lieutenant and by the underused Andrew Duggan, who seems too uncolorful when compared to the historical figure he stands in for. Presnell, who looks a bit like a poor man's Jimmy Stewart, is best when he's sardonic, such as his quip when meeting up with the retreating company at a river in the film's climax. The actual battle itself is interesting; without giving too much away, I'd say the film took a risk in its presentation, and it mostly pays off because the shock value reveals more than a conventional telling would or perhaps even could. "The Glory Guys" is a good film, great in many ways, but not quite as successful in what it attempts as, say, "Zulu," which feels like a cousin in spirit but ultimately is more dimensional in both character and sweep.

The story of how General George Armstrong Custer led his troops to their deaths at the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876 is a textbook example of military megalomania writ large in American history, and clearly a story ripe for a budding writer, which is what Sam Peckinpah was in the 1950s, when, at the request of the production team of Arthur Gardner, Jules Levin, and Arnold Laven, he was commissioned to write the screenplay for Hoffman Birney's novel "The Dice Of God", loosely based on the Custer story, and which was to become the basis for THE GLORY GUYS. But by the time the story went behind the cameras, Peckinpah, due to the fury that he had caused in Hollywood with the extreme production conflicts on MAJOR DUNDEE, was virtually blackballed from Hollywood. And while the end result is nowhere near a terrible product, one has to wonder just how much further this film would have gone had Peckinpah been given the opportunity to direct his own script.

Even in the finished film, there are themes Peckinpah had broached upon that are still there--the conflict between two men (Harve Presnell; Tom Tryon) and their commanding officer, a steely-eyed, almost dictatorial Cavalry commander (Andrew Duggan) out to put the Sioux in their place. As this kind of scenario had loosely played itself out in MAJOR DUNDEE, however, Laven, who directed the film, seemed to shift the film away from this critical look at personal and military obsession to the love triangle between Tryon, Presnell, and a pioneer woman (Senta Berger, returning from MAJOR DUNDEE) at their fort. It was a point that Peckinpah strongly (and unsurprisingly) found highly disagreeable. In the meantime, Laven does stage plenty of good action scenes, including the attack on the Sioux, but they don't have the kind of raw (let alone bloody) energy that Peckinpah would have bought to them, and the editing of these scenes, while more than competent, isn't quite up to what was even done in the action scenes of the unfairly butchered DUNDEE.

Still, it's hard to say too many bad things about a film that is still as far removed from the old John Ford/John Wayne cavalry films as MAJOR DUNDEE had been; and Tryon and Presnell are extremely competent in their roles (though rumor has it that Lee Marvin and James Coburn were both considered first, before salary conflicts forced Laven to settle for the other two). There are also early roles for James Caan as an Irish-born cavalryman; and Wayne Rogers, later to star in the long-running TV series M*A*S*H, as another cavalry officer. Slim Pickens, who is never anything less than memorable, also does a good turn as one of the members of the cavalry. Perhaps the best thing about THE GLORY GUYS, besides those moments when the film lays Duggan's military megalomania bare, is the superb cinematography, most of it done on location near Durango, Mexico, of James Wong Howe, who had won an Oscar in 1963 for HUD.

All in all, THE GLORY GUYS does hold up as an extremely competent film. But it still leaves one to wonder just how much further up the ladder of quality sagebrush film making it would have gone had Peckinpah been the one in the director's chair. One can, unfortunately, only speculate.

This is my favorite movie regarding the campaign of the U.S. Army vs. the Sioux nation which took place in May and June 1876, of which the Custer and the 7th Cavalry was the center of attention for the nation during its centennial celebration. Many movies have come out of Hollywood and none have ever depicted the battle at the Little Bighorn very accurately. This movie comes close to portraying one aspect of the battle reasonable accurately and that is the charge of Reno's battalion and its retreat to the bluffs where it held out along with Benteen's battalion. Unfortunately, nothing is shown of Custer's charge and annihilation but this would have made a long movie for which Americans have little patience. Historical accuracy is always the last factor in Hollywood and I believe that there would have been nothing wrong with using the actual commanding officers' names, i.e., Custer, Reno, Benteen, Sheridan, etc. The title, The Glory Guys, gives the wrong impression, which is the political correctness handed out by Hollywood, as to the motives of the commanding officers. Most are performing the duties required of them by the Army. Every officer and enlisted man wants to be successful in battle. It does result in promotions and glory but to do otherwise is to possibly forfeit ones' life. Men are fighting to survive and to protect their buddies. It is either kill or be killed. The Indians did not take prisoners and could and did commit the most heinous atrocities to those taken alive.