The Glory Guys (US 1965)

There are two reasons why this film interests me, or rather two names – Sam Peckinpah and James Wong Howe. This was a film Peckinpah might have hoped to direct. He’d written an adaptation of the novel by Hoffman Birney, The Dice of God, in 1956 when he started working for the production company founded by Arnold Laven, Arthur Gardner and Jules V. Levy which owned the rights to Birney’s story. Laven and Peckinpah worked together on the successful Western TV series The Rifleman before Peckinpah got the chance to direct his first two film  Westerns, The Deadly Companions (1961) and Ride the High Country (1962). In 1963 Peckinpah directed Major Dundee which would turn out to be his first truly disastrous confrontation with a studio after completing a film that ran significantly over budget and was far too long for a standard release. Columbia butchered the film which was eventually released in 1965. In the meantime he was fired from his fourth picture as director, The Cincinatti Kid which was taken over by Norman Jewison. Arnold Laven had decided to direct The Glory Guys himself and the film was released in July 1965 with Peckinpah still credited with the script. The next couple of years were arguably the lowest in Peckinpah’s career with his previously high reputation as the innovator on TV Westerns now trashed by producers associated with Columbia and MGM. In the latter case he also suffered from a fabricated scandal about the shooting of a nude scene.

The Glory Guys is a mainstream cavalry Western. Laven was mainly known as a producer and a prolific director of TV drama. He made only a handful of cinema features mostly for the Laven-Gardner-Levy company. One of Laven’s strategies in the 1950s was to register a title with the Writers’ Guild and then look for a property that might produce a script for the title. The Dice of God was intended to become a film titled ‘Custer’s Last Stand’, but a film with a similar title was underway at around the same time and thus the title change. How much of Peckinpah’s vision remains in the script used for The Glory Guys? There are certainly some familiar elements that turned up in Major Dundee, released earlier but written later. Peckinpah ‘contributed’ to the script for Dundee, seemingly unhappy with the work of Harry Julian Fink. How much he might have changed it is open to question, but Amos Dundee feels very much like a Peckinpah character. When he first tackled The Dice of God, Peckinpah arguably saw himself updating the familiar John Ford cavalry picture and there are recognisable elements in The Glory Guys. But the crucial device is to offer double male leads who might be in conflict because of different beliefs or histories, even if they have other things in common. (This is the basis for Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) with John Wayne and Henry Fonda as the mismatched pair.) In a Peckinpah film the two might have different views about the future of ‘the West’ and its codes of honour being replaced by capitalist exploitation. This was evident in Ride the High Country and would be repeated in many later Peckinpah films. In The Glory Guys, Tom Tryon plays Captain Demas Harrod, an officer with a past who is paired again with General McCabe (Andrew Duggan), a commanding officer he distrusts. At one point I thought McCabe could be the second leading male, but the second lead turns out to be the General’s scout Sol Rogers (Harve Presnell) and the ‘conflict’ is over a woman played by Senta Berger who has inherited the gunsmith’s business in Moose City close to the cavalry fort. General McCabe is the Custer figure who will disobey orders and send men to their deaths in an heroic but senseless attack on a larger force of ‘Plains Indians’ (who are never individualised in the film). As well as these four characters, only three others emerge in any detail from the large cast of smaller parts.

Slim Pickens plays the recruiting sergeant who first gathers the raw recruits at a railhead and his charges include Michael Anderson Jr. as a young man who has enlisted to escape his overbearing family and James Caan as a wise-cracking young Irishman seemingly always in trouble and up for a fight. Pickens was already a bona fide ‘character star’ of Westerns and Anderson was a young Englishman making his mark in three major Westerns in 1965. One of those three was Major Dundee in which he was again joined by Senta Berger and Slim Pickens. James Caan plays ‘large’ in only his second appearance in films after a successful stint in TV. He is entertaining but sometimes appears to be in another film altogether. However, if we play the game of mapping characters against those found in Ford’s Westerns and especially his cavalry pictures, these three all correspond – the regular Sergeant and the young naive trooper/young officer and Caan combining the Victor McLaglen fighting Irishman and any number of young bucks such as the Jeff Chandler or Ken Curtis characters in The Searchers. Peckinpah clearly didn’t buy the Caan combination but he did take Berger. He is reported to have said that he wouldn’t have cast Tryon or Presnell – and whatever their merits they don’t seem like Peckinpah players.

The structure of The Glory Guys fits the typical three-act sequence. The first act culminates in the recruits arriving at the fort and their reception and settling in while Captain Harrod re-acquaints himself with the other officers. Act two focuses on the preparations for the campaign and develops the Harrod-Rogers feud over Lou Woddard (Senta Berger). Act three comprises the action against the enemy. I think the general consensus is that acts one and two are a little ‘ho-hum’ but that act three is in many ways magnificent. The first two acts are notable for a cavalry dance referencing John Ford and a rolling saloon fist fight led by the James Caan character. Both of these feel like Peckinpah has written in some Fordian tropes. Alongside Caan, Michael Anderson Jr features in a sub-plot about him not being cut out for army life and possibly being ‘bought out’ by his father (and therefore missing out on his first romance). This too has its Fordian reference and indeed, because Ford made so many Westerns, much of the rest of the ‘action’ could be similarly seen as ‘referencing’. The real problem for me is Harve Presnell who just doesn’t belong in the film (he came out of musicals and was an accomplished singer but perhaps the most unlikely ‘Westerner’ ever to appear as a character in a Peckinpah script). But if I imagine James Coburn (who plays the scout in Major Dundee), everything might look different. Arthur Laven was an efficient director and on this film had a reasonable budget (including time spent in Durango) and a great cinematographer. I’m not criticising his direction apart from suggesting that it needed different leading personnel and a bit more ‘umph’ (partly to balance out the James Caan character’s antics).

James Wong Howe (1899-1976) was one of the most important cinematographers in ‘studio Hollywood’, shooting pictures from the late ‘teens to the mid 70s, just before he died. Wong Howe was already well-established before the studio era and soon found himself on major pictures in the 1930s. He filmed virtually every kind of feature, including Westerns. Previous to this film he’d worked on Hud (1963) and Outrage (1964), the first a ‘contemporary Western’ and the second a version of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Both films starred Paul Newman. Wong Howe was known for his innovative lighting tricks and his attempts to always create lighting that had a logical source in the scene. As far as this film is concerned he mentioned some of the careful lighting of indoor/studio scenes. But I think he comes into his own for the action scenes. There are some beautiful sequences of men on horseback in different forms of natural light against the landscape. Laven also choreographs the action well. I should add that several Western fansites that I’ve checked out also praise the production design of the fort (see above) as close to the real forts used in the ‘Indian Wars’. I couldn’t find any good quality images to illustrate the comments about the troop movements (which might be directly compared to Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949). The Japanese poster below does make a stab at creating a collage of scenes. Westerns like this had a world market, but it’s interesting that Senta Berger doesn’t appear on the poster.

I’m glad that, as a Peckinpah completist, I was able to see this and it adds to my sense of a ‘Peckinpah film’. This film is out of date now, but the title is nicely ironic. There was little ‘glory’ in the Indian Wars but at least this time the Native Americans won – even if it was because of an American General’s vanity.