The Glory Guys

I must admit that I know very little about Director Arnold Laven, who reportedly stepped in to replace the famous Sam Peckinpah. In fact, the latter even wrote THE GLORY GUYS screenplay (not one of his finer achievements).

Reliable actor Tom Tryon does his best with a role that sees him appear and disappear from the action without relatable logic. Harve Presnell, who competes with Tryon for the attention of exquisitely sensual Senta Berger, was much younger and not as good an actor in 1965 than in FARGO (1996) where he shone as the tight-fisted father in law who refuses to loan the sum that William H Macy so needs in order to get his business shenanigans up and running.

Apart from some very good battle sequences toward the end, there is not much that I find worth remembering... and even those sequences arise from a very basic millitary error that sees the US Cavalry pinned down in a valley with Indians descending from mountain and hilltops to attack.

Famous cameraman James Wong Howe is the film's greatest saving grace - lovely cinematography, superb battle choreography, credible stunts. 6/10.

This is way too long, but maybe the absence of a star to top the billing gives the plot a little more of a chance, and the story is OK. It's a not unfamiliar love triangle type of tale - with soldiers "Harrod" (Tom Tryon) and "Rogers" (Harve Presnell) vying for the affections of the rather fickle "Lou" (Senta Berger) who seems to me quite adept at stringing both men along quite nicely. Once we escape from the rather dull romantic elements, the action sequences as both men have to put their hormonal differences aside and focus on the marauding Sioux start to hot up, and soon we've got a decent amount of whooping and tomahawk throwing as the army and the natives square up for quite a conflagration. It's colourful and entertaining once it gets going and though it offers little new, it is still a well produced and photographed western which with some pruning (almost all of the romance could go for a start) would still make for a decent cavalry story.

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 (for whom he would create the legendary TV western series "The Rifleman"), 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 in mid-1964, Peckinpah, due to the fury that he had caused in Hollywood with the extreme production conflicts on MAJOR DUNDEE, was about to be 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, which he in fact never did, contrary to what has been reported here at the Internet Movie Database (I for one would like to see corroborating evidence of that claim that he directed even a small part of it).

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, since his focus was on the near-fundamentalist behavior of Duggan's character. 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, as opposed to the more workmanlike direction of Laven. One can, unfortunately, only speculate.

Although producer Arnold Laven got the directorial credit he did this film along the lines laid out by Sam Peckinpah who wrote the script and started directing the film. The usual 'creative differences' were the official reason given for Peckinpah leaving the film, but more than likely it had something to do with Sam's undisciplined nature.

The Glory Guys is a wonderful cavalry western with a plot borrowed partially from Fort Apache and part from the story in the Bible about David, Bathsheba, and Uriah the Hittite. Uriah in this case is Captain Tom Tryon and not because of jealousy, but because of his lust for glory and medals, General Andrew Duggan has decided that a troop of raw recruits is to be the Judas Goat led to the slaughter, a troop which Tryon commands and has a month to whip in some kind of shape so they can have a fighting chance against the Sioux.

Fort Apache itself is a southwestern version of the Custer and the Little Big Horn story and The Glory Guys takes much of its tone about the camaraderie of the soldiers from those Ford westerns. The characters you see played by Slim Pickens, Michael Anderson, Jr., and James Caan could easily have been found at and in Fort Apache.

Romance is a rough thing at this army post as Tryon and scout Harve Presnell have a nice rivalry going for Senta Berger. But when it comes to the business of the cavalry, these two bury the hatchet lest an Sioux hatchet be buried in them.

Without the presence of some big box office stars The Glory Guys tends to get overlooked. But if you see it broadcast, don't you overlook it.

I originally saw this movie back in 1965 when it first came out and I have always had fond memories of it . It is definitely not as substantial as Wild Bunch, Sam P's masterpiece western, but it is an intelligent movie that builds great characters who make up the film.

Tom Tryon is good as the maverick Captain who worries more about the lives and survival of his men then the prime directive of the General, played in his great evil fashion by Andrew Duggan. Harve Presnell,as Sol the scout makes a good foil for Tryon as they compete for the love interest,the widow Woodward, played by Senta Berger The standout characters to me are Slim Pickens as the long-suffering sergeant who must mold the misfits into a fighting troop, and a very young, brash James Caan as Dugan, the Irish ne'er do well, who becomes a soldier after all.

Because of the time period the Indians are pretty one dimensional and uniform, unlike later movie representations like Little Big Man, but they do pull off clever fighting tactics and the hand to hand combat is fierce for its day.

Like later war movies, the enemy is often the high brass or the law, just as much as the opposing forces.

I could only find this movie in VHS, so I recorded it on my DVD recorder so I could keep it for posterity.