Customer Reviews

Real Glory [VHS]

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

 

 

I watched this movie for the first time today. And what a treat! The characters are cast extremely well, with Gary Cooper as a down-to-earth Army medic who can track patrols in the jungle, capture assasins, fight a cholera epidemic, and blow a dam, not to mention falling in love in the process. The storyline is as follows: an Army colonel is given the difficult job of training Filipino soldiers in a dangerous section of the Philipines, right when the Army pulls out, leaving him with a handful of officers and a doctor. The local bandit chief has the colonel and his next-in-command killed by fanatics. From then on there is open war between soldiers and bandits. The new CO must get the Filipino soldiers into fighting condition before the bandits attack, and the doctor disagrees with his methods. The tension mounts until the final battle when the native soldiers prove that they can take care of themselves.
This movie has a lot of dialogue about fear, which reminded me of FDR's phrase: "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." This movie was put out in 1939, when there was a lot of fear circulating. We were still in the Depression, and things were heating up in Europe. So the overall message against fear was very appropriate for the times. This is a very good story!

By coincidence, I rented this the night before the World Trade Center bombings, and this pre-WWII action film definitely had an eerie feel later in the week, when I got around to watching it. Gary Cooper plays an Army doctor contending with Muslim fanatics in the Philippines -- including grim assassins who attacked the Army leaders in suicide missions that they believed would send them to heaven, with the blessing of Allah. Besides the creepy timeliness, this is also a gripping action film; raw, realistic and well-paced, this is a fascinating movie, even if its historical accuracy is somewhat questionable.

The Real Glory is a great movie. With Gary Cooper, David Niven and Broderick Crawford how could it be anything else. A real War/Adventure epic of a Phillipine rebellian in the dawn of the 20th century. Anyone who knew anything about the Phillipines could understand just what was happening. In fact similar things are happening in the Phillipines today without any US troops involved, just a few American citizens about to be beheaded.

THE REAL GLORY is terrific old-fashioned action/adventure, with Gary Cooper every inch the hero. Playing an Army medic, Cooper is perfect as he virtually single-handedly puts down a rebellion in the Phillipines at the dawn of the 20th Century. Highly recommended.

A textbook example of how to make an intelligent, never-let-up action/adventure film. Beautifully paced, it stars Gary Cooper (as expected, perfectly cast), David Niven and Broderick Crawford. This ranks as one of the best adventure films ever made. Not as well known as Cooper's "Lives of a Bengal Lancer", but in many ways it holds up far better than that classic.

In Henry Hathaway's post-Spanish-American war movie THE REAL GLORY, Gary Cooper heads an American contingent sent to Southeast Asia. Their mission: train a Philippino police force to combat local terrorists then randomly attacking and looting villages. As with GUNGA DIN (1939), Cooper, David Niven and Broderick Crawford are comrades-in-arms in a hostile land. Here however, the trio of military men ultimately don't fare as well.

"Resl Glory" is these days not only considered un-PC by some, it was frowned upon as far back as 1942, when the U.S. government requested the picture (reissued as "A Yank in the Philippines") be withdrawn from theaters. Specifically, the story's villains, Philippine Muslims condescendingly referred to as "Moros," were now our allies against Japanese invaders.

This film also perpetuates the myth of a helpless little brown brother and benevolent Uncle Sam as his rescuer (think: Vietnam, circa 1965). Truth is, America invaded these islands long before Japan, and we had more than a few enemies there, especially among native Muslims.


Related item:
Previously, Cooper and director Hathaway collaborated on the Afghan-set "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" (1935). This excellent adventure is available for a bargain price on THE GARY COOPER COLLECTION, along with "Beau Geste" (1939), "The General Died at Dawn" (1935), "Design For Living" (1933) and "Peter Ibbetson" (1935).


Parenthetical number preceding title is a 1 to 10 imdb viewer poll rating.

(6.6) The Real Glory (1939) - Gary Cooper/David Niven/Andrea Leeds/Reginald Owen/Broderick Crawford/Kay Johnson/Russell Hicks/Vladimir Sokoloff/Benny Inocencio/Charles Waldron

A great movie, and I view it as an allegory for the Pacific war of World War II.
Filmed in 1939, very early in the war, the movie can be viewed as rather symbolic of what the Allies had to do to deal with the Moro-like Japanese invaders, even down to the suicidal attacks of the 'juramentados' and their similarity to kamikazes.
My father saw this movie early in the war, and later was sent to Mindanao where he met a Moro Sultan himself!
:-) TB

SET IN 1906, THE SCRIPT COULD BE CHANGED BY ONE WORD, IRAQ, AND 100 YEARS. US TROOPS, MUZZLUMS, TRAINING LOCALS, SUICIDE KILLERS, PRISONER ABUSE (WITH A PIGSKIN), ROADSIDE BOMBS-( SPEARS ), EVIL WARLORD, BLOWING UP BRIDGES. IT'S RIGHT OUT OF TODAYS HEADLINES. YOU REALLY CAN LEARN FROM HISTORY, WOW! YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE THIS MOVIE AND TELL OTHERS.

One of the few movies to address the colonial wars that we fought in the P.I.s. (Yes we have been fighting the Muslims for a long time now) Garry Cooper does a 1st rate job on a forgotten / ignored part of our military history.

A disaster movie masquerading as an imperialist jungle army adventure, as we sit through an hour and a half of character tomfoolery, sinister plots and love interests before the final spectacular set-piece, an old-fashioned dam-busting that spurts a Wagnerian birth-rush, waking up the cholera-ridden locals.

It's easy enough to carp at the typical ideology - the well-rounded Americans; the infantilised Filipino locals; the sinister Fu Manchu villains. More interesting are the cracks - the violent vengefulness that grips David Niven's previously amiable character; the shocking murder of the commander in front of his wife and impotent peers; the blind intransigence of Captain Hartley.