On the advice of his psychiatrist, Murray thanks De Niro for (sorta) saving his life by taking him out for a boozy night on the town and lending him Uma Thurman, a hard-luck bartender forced to work for Murray to pay off her brother's debts. Murray promises that since De Niro has done right by him, he will become the "expeditor" of his dreams, but that if crossed, he'll turn De Niro's life into a "raging sea." This is Murray's idea of how educated people talk.

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When a nervous Thurman shows up at De Niro's apartment, explaining that she's been told to spend a week with him as a "seven-day singing telegram," De Niro is both excited and flustered. I don't know of many heterosexuals who'd turn down seven days with Uma Thurman, no matter how weird or morally questionable the circumstances.

Like a loan-sharking Aladdin, Murray posits himself as a catalyst for De Niro's dreams. But he proves a duplicitous genie, the kind that promises the world, then sends his clients a bill larded with hidden charges. In return for De Niro's questionable heroism, Murray gives him an even more questionable reward. Murray is operating with a drug-dealer mentality; the first taste is always free. After that, you've gotta pay, and pay dearly.

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Murray knows enough about De Niro's character to know that De Niro won't use Thurman for seven days of wanton, no-strings attached sex, then discard her. He's a desperately lonely man with a moral compass, however wavering, so it's unsurprising that he quickly falls in love with Thurman and deludes himself into thinking she reciprocates his affection. The sex scenes between De Niro and Thurman have a refreshingly true-to-life awkwardness; At the risk of pandering to readers' baser instincts, I will also point out that there is quite a bit of Thurman nudity here. So, you know, it's got that going for it.

Yet there's a fundamental inertness to the central romance. Where De Niro, Murray, Caruso, and a scene-stealing Mike Starr as Murray's incongruously pleasant lead flunky, are multi-dimensional, sharply written characters, Thurman is fuzzy and underdeveloped. This inertness makes Glory less than the sum of its formidable parts: Price's often brilliant script, Robby Müller's evocative cinematography, expert use of Chicago locations, and Elmer Bernstein's haunting, sorrowful score.

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For a film with so many wonderful moments, Glory is strangely unsatisfying as a whole, though that's partially attributable to re-shoots and post-production cop-outs I'll discuss later. The De Niro-Thurman relationship is the film's weakest element, but it leads to one of my favorite scenes. In it, De Niro, giddy at triumphantly breaking his celibate streak, enters a brutal crime scene in an Italian restaurant and all but skips over to the jukebox, puts on Louis Prima's ebullient "Just A Gigolo," and starts singing along and doing a dance of pure joy. He bops along obliviously, flagrantly expressing his lust for life in the least appropriate venue. De Niro's tinny little black-and-white world has suddenly gone Technicolor. He can't control his exhilaration; love, or at least lust, has made this consummate professional behave in a hilariously unprofessional manner. The film follows suit, taking a moony, momentary leap from semi-realistic understatement to goofy comedy.

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Then Murray reappears to shatter De Niro's illusions and demand the return of his sentient property in a timely fashion. When Murray arrives at De Niro's home at the pre-determined drop-off date, De Niro stumblingly announces that he loves Thurman and might even marry her. "You love her? I own her!" Murray screams. In that moment, the façade of gentility drops, and Murray becomes utterly terrifying, a bully who collects and trades people like baseball cards. He's a thug. But he's also a businessman, so he offers De Niro a deal; in exchange for Thurman's freedom, he'll let De Niro assume her debt, either by becoming his stooge on the force, or by paying him what he thinks Thurman is worth.

Murray is not entirely without compassion. There is a wonderful moment where he breaks down and tells De Niro, "You saved my life, so I'm going to let you have her." Then, after a pregnant pause, he finishes, "…for $40,000." That's what life is worth to Murray: a fucking discount. And not even a big one at that.

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[SPOILER!] Mad Dog And Glory initially ended with Murray soundly defeating De Niro in fisticuffs in the climax, an ending test audiences rejected. They didn't want to believe that Dr. Peter Venkman could beat the shit out of Travis Bickle. In the context of Price's unsentimental world, the original ending makes perfect sense. Murray is a towering bully. De Niro is a meek little mouse. So of course De Niro isn't going to pull a 180 and defeat his tormentor through brute force.

So re-shoots were scheduled to cynically give audiences what the studio imagined they wanted. In the theatrical version that limped into theaters a full year after its original release date, De Niro takes a beating from Murray, but ultimately ends up victorious. Murray semi-inexplicably forgives their debts (why? Cause fickle test audiences wanted him to) and washes his hands of De Niro and Thurman. Cue bullshit happy ending.

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Test audiences similarly found Thurman's character unsympathetic. So new scenes were filmed to make her seem less mercenary and more of a victim. Yet I never bought that Thurman loved De Niro. He was the lesser of two evils, temporary shelter from the storm, not a final destination. How can you respect someone who doesn't respect himself? Then again, the magic of cinema is that you can write your own endings. We can give ourselves the satisfying, uncompromising unhappy endings Hollywood finds so difficult to stomach.

In my imagination, Glory ends with Thurman leaving De Niro in his sleep after a week or so of hanging around solely out of gratitude. Even after re-shoots, Glory is still plenty dark, but its ending is hopelessly compromised and unsatisfying. As originally filmed, Glory was a dark fable about a weak man with a rinky-dink code of chivalry destroyed by a world with no use for his half-assed nobility, and a thug who aspires to be something more, but can't escape his fundamental meanness. Post re-shoots, it became a lukewarm quasi-romantic comedy about a meek man who finally musters up the courage to fight for the woman he loves.

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Test screenings and re-shoots robbed the film of much of its bite and integrity without making it commercially viable. Audiences were still turned off by the idea of loveable slacker Bill Murray playing a ruthless bastard who threatens to kill Thurman via viral murder, hissing, "Do you know what botulism is? We can get her with soup," and badass Robert De Niro playing a squirmy little nothing in a tonally tricky black comedy. All the re-shoots accomplished was transforming a potentially great movie, a '90s King Of Comedy, even, into a good but profoundly flawed little sleeper, a kicked-around orphan worthy of re-discovery.

In the decade following Glory's anticlimactic release, Murray proved himself as a dramatic actor and De Niro made an enormously successful buddy comedy about a depressed mobster in therapy opposite a Saturday Night Live alumnus. It was called Analyze This, and in a strange twist, it was directed by the filmmaker most strongly associated with Murray—Harold Ramis, who wrote, directed, or starred opposite his muse in Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, and Groundhog Day. Now there was a film that knew what audiences wanted, and didn't have to betray itself to give it to them.

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Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success