In past mall-shopping escapades I've stopped to stare at those Magic Eye posters that produce a three-dimensional image if one looks at them just right, to no avail each time. What am I doing wrong? And so it is with Glory, whose transcendence is far more visible to others. That said, we're talking about an Edward Zwick film co-starring Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman: its surface treasures are richer than the sum of most musket movies (The Patriot, anyone?). But are you sure you're not cutting Glory too much slack because of the educational subject matter at hand?

This is, after all, a Civil War epic in which Cliff De Young essentially imports the uppish villain he played in F/X--and he's not alone among the supporting cast of familiar yet unwelcome white faces (Jay O. Sanders, Richard Riehle). Cardboard cut-outs demand actors with personality, and since the black characters are scarcely more rounded but inhabited by the charismatic likes of "Homicide"'s Andre Braugher, the film becomes so one-sided as to threaten to topple over. Matthew Broderick, Glory's lead, hardly unifies the two camps. As Robert Gould Shaw, the true-life Caucasian commander of history's first all-African-American regiment, Broderick is cornered into a phonetic Catch-22: he's damned if he speaks in a Massachusetts drawl (by nitpickers) and damned if he doesn't (by a different set of nitpickers); his whole vibe is too New York Modern for the role.

Shaw owns the stage in Glory--the screenplay caters to his arc, thus becoming another cinematic backpat to the white majority for seeing the error of its ways. There are scenes almost too patronizing to bear, such as when Shaw apocryphally proclaims that everybody in his company will go without wages immediately upon learning that the black soldiers in training have been dealt a pay cut for racist reasons. A gush of altruism could not possibly decide something so monumental, and only Frank Capra might be capable of convincing us of otherwise.

Glory's great moments don't quite counterbalance its lapses in logic and taste, but they're similarly unmistakable. The 54^th's parade down River Street, where numbers of them grew up as first- or second-generation slaves, is epiphanical, while a contemporary vitality liberates the more teachy encounters--Shaw's impromptu artillery lesson, for instance, or the undue whipping he orders on rebellious Trip (Washington, in an Oscar-winning performance). It's easy to see why Washington and Freddie Francis' cinematography nabbed Academy Awards back in 1990, although the 'scope treatment couldn't have hurt the sometimes cramped 1.85:1 frame.

Said images are well-served by Columbia Tri-Star's new dual-platter DVD re-release of Glory, a few depreciated shots notwithstanding. The 16x9-enhanced transfer on Disc One is calmly saturated and neither too sharp nor too soft, though grain occasionally gets out of hand (especially during chapter 4). Disc Two houses a standard version that sports strengths and weaknesses identical to its counterpart. In both cases, compression is alleviated by RSDL encoding.

Also shared by each disc is powerful (and, again, Oscar-winning) Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Though not as memorable as later war movie mixes (Saving Private Ryan and even The Patriot come to mind), the surround field produces a veritable home theatre fireworks display. LFE (.1) information provides the bookend battles strategic punctuation.

Where the complementary Glorys diverge is in the area of supplements. Disc One includes an excellent video commentary--when selected, three alternating PIP windows will pop up containing Broderick, Freeman, or Zwick. (Caveat: you cannot view this extra unless in 4:3 mode.) Sage Freeman, here pondering the unspoken segregation still prevalent in Western society, is, unsurprisingly, a captivating raconteur; too, Broderick's fond recollections engage. But Zwick, slightly dishier than he was on either Legends of the Fall or Courage Under Fire, benefits the most from being on camera, as he seems a drier presence in a separate, purely audio feature-length track. (Only this additional commentary is recycled for Disc Two.)

The second disc, besides containing Glory in full-frame, offers: the Freeman-narrated "The True Story of Glory Continues", a 45-minute overview of the 54^th regiment uncluttered by fictitious elements but also less compelling than Glory, especially in its cheesy video re-enactments; the 11-minute "Voices of Glory", in which actual letters from the period are read aloud to moving effect; a 7-minute promotional featurette; a pair of deleted scenes with optional commentary from Zwick (I was happy to hear him fess up that the second one is just plain bad); talent files; and trailers for Glory, A Soldier's Story, and Devil in a Blue Dress.-Bill Chambers

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
122 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
1.85:1, 16x9-enhanced/
Standard 1.33:1
Languages
English DD 5.1,
English Dolby Surround - Disc 2 only,
French Dolby Surround
CC
Yes
Subtitles
English, French, Thai, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish
2 DVD-9s
Region One
Columbia Tri-Star

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Published: January, 2001