The Glory Guys

Screenwriter Sam Peckinpah might have made more of this fatalistic Western adventure, from the novel The Dice of God by Hoffman Birney, than journeyman Laven, but it's a diverting picture all the same. Tryon's the cavalry captain sent to join general Duggan's frontier regiment, only to find the latter obsessed with defeating the combined local Indian forces. If anything, the film should be called 'The Glory Guy' because it's Duggan's drive to personal fulfilment, even at the cost of his men's lives, which is the central strand of this examination of control-gone-mad. The result's hardly a masterpiece, but it builds to a nicely mounted battle that pushes the point home.