Turner Classic Movies features Glory tonite at 8:00 pm EDT as part of a Denzel Washington slate of films. The TCM website says this:
Glory received widespread critical praise upon release with Variety proclaiming that it "has the sweep and magnificence of a Tolstoy battle tale or a John Ford saga of American history." Vincent Canby, The New York Times film critic, concurred, writing "Glory is the first serious American movie about the Civil War to be made in years. There haven't been that many anyway - D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), Buster Keaton's The General (1927), David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind (1939) and John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage (1951). Almost everything else has been balderdash...Although Glory employs the devices of fiction and sometimes is as brightly colored as a recruiting poster, it seems as severe as a documentary alongside those earlier films...Glory is celebratory, but it celebrates in a manner that insists on acknowledging the sorrow. This is a good, moving, complicated film." In addition to Denzel Washington's Best Supporting Actor Oscar®, Glory was nominated for four other Academy Awards including Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Cinematography (by Freddie Francis); it won in the latter two categories.
Don't know why the Best Sound Oscar, but Best Cinematography? -- definitely! Hard to believe it was released two decades ago.
P.S. @ It's been awhile since I had seen the movie, so the emotion I felt watching it begin just now was surprising. Robert Osborne's introduction was informative, then the Tri-Star pictures intro, then...the spine-tingling overture as the words about Shaw and his letters appear...including a curious reference to his papers being at Harvard, what other movie opens with such an academic item?...and the quotations from a letter about African-Americans...and Union artillery racing down a road, after which the infantry steps into formation...and then Antietam, terrible Antietam, with shot and shell and carnage...and the face of Morgan Freeman appearing...and...the field hospital scene that cuts suddenly into Shaw's Boston drawing room (reminiscent of The Deerhunter) and the appearance of Frederick Douglass... The first 10 minutes might just be the most awful and awesome in motion picture history. I don't know if I can stand to watch the rest tonite.
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