| The Glory Guys | |
| Director: | Arnold Laven |
| Screenplay: | Sam Peckinpah |
| Starring: | Tom Tryon Harve Presnell Senta Berger James Caan Michael Anderson, Jr. |
| Editing: | Tom Rolf |
| Music: | Riz Ortolani |
| Cinematography: | James Wong Howe |
| Color Process: | DeLuxe Color |
| Studio: | Levy-Gardner-Laven |
| Distributor: | United Artists |
| Runtime: | 112 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Budget: | $1.6 million[1] |
| Language: | English |
The Glory Guys is a 1965 American Western Panavision film directed by Arnold Laven and written by Sam Peckinpah based on the 1956 novel The Dice of God by Hoffman Birney. Produced by Levy-Gardner-Laven and released by United Artists, the film stars Tom Tryon, Harve Presnell, Senta Berger, James Caan and Michael Anderson Jr.
Two cavalry soldiers under the command of a tough general fight Plains Indians and fall for the same woman.
Producers Arthur Gardner, Arnold Laven and Jules Levy sought an inexperienced, and therefore affordable, writer to adapt Hoffman Birney's book The Dice of God into a screenplay. Impressed by Sam Peckinpah's scripts for Gunsmoke, Laven hired Peckinpah to write the screenplay in 1956. Peckinpah worked on the script for more than four months, but the producers were unable to raise funding for the project and it was temporarily abandoned,[2] although Laven worked with Peckinpah in television in the ensuing years.[3]
The project's original title was Custer's Last Stand, but when Twentieth Century-Fox announced its upcoming The Day Custer Fell, later canceled for budgetary reasons,[4] the producers changed the script in order to make the characters fictitious.
In 1965, with funding finally in place, the production of The Glory Guys began. However, under Laven's direction, the film greatly deviated from Peckinpah's script, with heightened emphasis on its romantic elements. Peckinpah later called the film "... a total disaster because of the casting. All the people in the picture were good. That is, they’ve all been good in other pictures but they didn’t really belong in that one. It’s a wretched film. And one of the reasons I’ve made up my mind not to write any more. But I was on the street. I had to write."[5]
The film was shot in Durango, Mexico, and its climactic battle scene involved thousands of extras on 20000acres of land. The scene required several weeks of preparation and filming, including training many horses to fall on cue.
The film's total production cost was approximately $1.6 million.
The titles were created by Joseph Mugnaini for Format Productions.
Critical reviews were mixed, with some lamenting the film's focus on its love story rather than on the battle with the Indians, who are not shown until the final battle scene.[6]
In a contemporary review, critic Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times called the film "pretty much par for the course" and containing "... all the backing and filling and ground-pawing with which an unhappy tradition insists on killing the first hour before we finally mount up and ride out to meet the hostiles." However, Scheuer praised the cinematography: "Producers Levy-Gardner-Laven have made a fairly modest budget stretch into the high, wide and handsome, thanks largely to the panoramic camera focused on the infinite as well as infinity by the resourceful James Wong Howe. Anyhow, Custer's Last Stand really 'plays.'"[7]