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Only a single tear rolls down his cheek. In perhaps the most emotionally harrowing and poignant moment of Edward Zwick’s Glory (at least this side of Fort Wagner), it is this lonely drop of water descending Denzel Washington’s face that breaks viewers. It is even easy to mistake the tear as what won Washington his first of two Oscars (so far). Hence why some have dubbed the moment his “signature move,” a claim Washington has forcefully and rightly dismissed.
And yet, it isn’t the tear that makes the scene of Private Silas Trip’s flogging so heartbreaking; it’s everything else Washington is doing in the moment, which stands starkly and diametrically opposed to that small bit of sentimentality. It’s a devastating portrait of a man in a single, unblinking glance, and it turned a theater kid from upstate New York into a movie star. It’s why, among other reasons, we keep returning to Glory after all these decades.
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Released 35 years ago this month, Glory remains arguably the greatest movie ever made about the American Civil War. And Washington is one of the chief architects of the movie’s legacy. Already a talented Broadway actor when he was cast in the film, Washington had previously made in-roads in Hollywood after doing phenomenal work in Norman Jewison’s adaptation of A Soldier’s Story in 1984 and starring in Richard Attenborough’s well-meaning, but far more dated biopic, Cry Freedom (1987). The latter was a movie that turned the life of the murdered anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko into something of a white savior narrative about his biographer.
Admittedly, Glory came close to making similar mistakes. While beautifully written by Civil War buff Kevin Jarre (also a forgotten, unsung hero on Tombstone), Jarre made no secret about how he was inspired to write the film by a famed monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Boston Common. It is the same gallant work of art which is revealed in intimate detail during Glory’s ending credits.
The son of wealthy and passionate abolitionists from New England and the man who would command the first Black infantry in United States history—leading them all the way to his death on the shores of South Carolina—Shaw is deserving of every bit of commendation he earns. But the story of the first Black men allowed to fight for their freedom in a war waged over America’s Original Sin, the story of Glory both as a film and an idea, should never be the white man’s alone.
Yet Glory was almost that movie. The film is still told largely from Shaw’s point-of-view and is played on the screen with extreme self-doubt and lamentation over his merit by Matthew Broderick. The movie begins with Shaw barely surviving the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day during the war, and afterward being told of the Emancipation Proclamation. We are likewise introduced to the real political power force over the 54th’s creation, Frederick Douglass, from Shaw’s limited perspective.
Apparently much and more of Jarre’s original screenplay was intended to be Shaw’s story. Meanwhile the actual lives and miseries of the Black men who fought and died by Shaw’s side were fairly tertiary, with most of them inaccurately being depicted as former enslaved men who escaped the Antebellum South. In actuality, most of the real 54th were freedmen born in Massachusetts and other Union states. Glory’s historical embellishment on this particular point survives into the final film and director Zwick’s rewrites of the shooting script.
Nonetheless, Zwick’s focus proved far more astute and egalitarian than originally intended—so much so he recently revealed Broderick’s manager and mother made a lot of noise on the actor’s behalf before production all the way up to seeing a cut of the film where entire subplots about Shaw’s school days with fellow white officer Major Cabot Forbes (Cary Elwes) and just about every scene between Shaw and his mother (Jane Alexander) were deleted.
This was not done by malice on Zwick’s part; it was done because he realized that the power of the 54th’s sacrifice is that they were literally sacrificed. To prove their valor and worth to the Union Army, these Black men, led by Shaw, needed to volunteer for essentially a suicide mission across the walls of a fort that was never taken. And they did this while fighting to preserve a Union that had left millions like them in bondage for nearly a century, and which still refused to give them the vote or the full rights of citizens—in fact, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t even apply to the border states who sided with the North.
This is the story of the Black men, be they born free or runaway slaves. Men embodied by the likes of Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher), who as a childhood friend to Shaw represented what was much more of the 54th’s fighting force; and also men like Morgan Freeman’s John Rawlings, Jihmi Kennedy’s Jupiter Starts, both of whom were born in bondage and risked surrendering their body again to the whip and lash should they be captured alive or lose this war… and men like Denzel Washington’s Silas Trip.
Which brings us back to that pivotal scene in the movie that elevated Washington to the rarified heights of movie stardom and Oscar winner. In this fateful cinematic moment, Trip has been captured after going AWOL. Broderick’s vacillating Shaw is pressured by his blatantly racist drill sergeant (John Finn) to flog Trip in front of the whole regiment for desertion; a punishment Shaw’s subordinate Forbes is horrified by due to the heinous connotations of whipping a Black man, particularly in a military regiment meant to champion the end of slavery. Without bothering to ask why Trip was discovered away from his tent, or to know the full extent of the situation, Shaw agrees to have Trip flogged in order to maintain what he believes is discipline and order.
After the order is given, Washington throws the shirt off his back like it were just one more chain he was eager to strip off. In the process, he reveals a back long butchered by a spider’s web of scars. The look of contempt Washington gives right into the camera, and right into Shaw’s soul, challenges you to not look away. He is saying, what is one more beating from a white man?
That is at least how Trip wants to appear in the moment. Yet as we watch the sequence play out, there is more than just defiance in Washington’s face. There is also a beleaguered pride in his ability to see right through the bigotries of an oppressive system, even here in relative freedom of the North, and perhaps a pang of sorrow too. The tear reveals the humanity beneath the pride—the truth that all men, no matter how righteous, can bleed. It betrays a question still in search of a final answer: what does true freedom in America look like for a Black man?
Before this fateful moment, we’ve been attuned to Trip’s bleak pessimism, even when it is so charismatically and gregariously played by Washington. The film pits his character against Braugher’s freedman Thomas as if this is a clash between a cynic and idealist; the malcontent and the problem-solver. For many white viewers in 1989, and perhaps now, it is easier to sympathize with Thomas, the kind and good-natured man who is introduced as Shaw’s boyhood chum. He is belittled and demeaned by men like Trip, who in lesser hands might come across as little more than a bully. No one should make that mistake.
It happens, as underscored by the times Washington is still perplexed when white journalists ask why Trip is so hard to like, but there is another, richer way to read Trip’s dichotomy. The character is not cynical. He is realistic, and Washington imbues that practicality with swaggering authenticity that is unbowed, but not necessarily unbroken. Granted, there were not many former enslaved men in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, and there weren’t any who were flogged for desertion (that manner of punishment was banned in the Union Army in 1861, several years before the film is set).
But while inaccurate, the scene is painfully truthful. A well-intended and even compassionate white man is bent by the system to do the oppressive, racist thing because it is easier, and the Black man bears the agony of the mistake. It is up to Washington’s eyes alone to communicate the weight of this injustice, and he shrewdly refuses to play it like a victim. There is neither fear nor anguish in the face, just bitter recognition of a Black man’s reality in America, be it in the 19th or 20th century. According to the actor, even the tear was real, a byproduct of the fake whip being wet and actually hurting as it tore into his back. (Hence his disdain for the tear being called a “signature move.”)
Washington plays Trip like so many other of his great performances, wise and unburdened by pretense or delusions of decorum. He knows what time it is, even if it hurts like all goddamn hell.
One of the powers of Glory is that despite being largely told from the white man’s perspective, it admits to the fundamental limitation and flaw in such a prism. Shaw learns that Trip was not deserting, nor that he is the troublemaker the drill sergeant and apparently some white viewers believed. He was searching for shoes, because Shaw’s army was letting the men’s feet freeze in the rain and snow due to the color of their skin.
Shaw responds by doing the right thing, but it doesn’t make him and Trip friends. In fact, the only time Trip lets his guard down in the film, in the scene where Washington plays the character with true sentimentality, is when he is surrounded by other Black men aware they’re probably about to die the next day. As the men around them sing a hymn, our two ideological opponents, Washington’s Trip and Braugher’s Thomas, are the two most moved and awkward—neither prepared to be so vulnerable. Still, they sing all the same.
The next day they die too, including with Trip beside Shaw. Both men die around a flag they never get to see wave above the ramparts of the fort. They are subsequently buried together. The two were never friends, and they never could fully understand the other’s perspective, which came to a violent tragic head at the end of the whip, but they both gave their last full measure to make a better world. And the fact we know Trip did this after seeing the unsparing truth in Washington’s eyes, makes that shared final destination between the men all the more piercing—and gallant that they rushed up a hill together without ever seeing the promised land on the other side.
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