GLORY (Edward Zwick, 1989): To celebrate Black History Month, Guy Movie of the Week would like to honor the brave men of the 54th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. The 54th were the first black soldiers in the Civil War in a time when the white generals believed that a black man didn't have what it took to be soldier.

Well a black man can bleed like a soldier, and a black man can die like a soldier, and the 54th proved to the white men in charge that a black man can fight like a soldier. In 1863, the near suicidal attack on a Charleston bunker proved once and for all the viability of black troops, and tens of thousands more were enlisted, thus turning the tide of the war. The white men who write history would have you believe that Lincoln freed the slaves. But let's not forget the black men who died fighting for their own freedom.

In Glory, white boy Matthew Broderick plays Bostonian Colonel Robert Shaw, a gentleman soldier who has seen some hard fighting and is a little shell shocked. But he comes from a good liberal family, the kind of people who ate tea and crumpets with Frederick Douglass, and when the 54th all-volunteer black infantry is formed, he volunteers to lead it.

All does not go smoothly. The black troops have trouble getting uniforms, and have trouble getting paid. They have to deal with the bigotry of their white counterparts, and the injustice of a military leadership who would prefer to use them as simple laborers. Relations among the men are complicated, too. Shaw has to deal with the tension of leading his old school chum, Thomas (André Braugher), a free man who was raised wealthy and is a little too soft for the hardships he is about to face. Escaped slave Trip (Denzel Washington) is filled with fire and hatred for all whites, and reserves only scorn for free men and house slaves. Morgan Freeman's Rawlins is older, and wiser, and clashes with the passionate Trip as he rises through the ranks, but still must struggle for the white man's respect.

It is unfortunately that so many men had to die to prove so obvious a point, that the black men could fight. But for us the moviegoer, we are treated to some of the greatest Civil War battles ever put to celluloid, and a near perfect (as far as I know) recreation of the mid-19th century warfare. And all the fighting, and courage, and dying, is particularly exciting because it was for such a noble cause, and there were such noble men dying for it.

Glory is about black men, but it is, by extension, about all men. It is a story that shows how a man, even when faced with the greatest hardship imaginable, beaten, whipped, subjugated, chased by dogs, and disrespected at every turn, can find the well of courage and honor within himself to fight for what's important, and to survive, and sometimes even to forgive.