The Glory Guys

The Glory Guys (1965)

Eee-Yo!!! Here comes the Glory Guys!

Though a fictionalized Western based on George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the film is almost a generic war story covering the enlistment, training, and operational deployment of a group of recruits that could take place in any time period.

Date of release
1965-07-07
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (35)
Runtime
1h 52m
Genres
Drama, Action, Western, Romance
Director
Arnold Laven

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Mexico

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.

Production

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.

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, the producers fictionalised the characters and altered the script.

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.

The film was shot in Durango, Mexico, and its climactic battle scene involved thousands of extras on 20,000 acres (81 km2) 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.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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