Denzel Washington won his first Oscar for Glory, and you can still trace the scene where he blew 'em all away.

Only a single tear rolls down his cheek. In perhaps the most emotionally harrowing and poignant moment of Edward Zwick's Glory (at least this side of Fort Wagner), it is this lonely drop of water descending Denzel Washington's face that breaks viewers. It is even easy to mistake the tear as what won Washington his first of two Oscars (so far). Hence why some have dubbed the moment his "signature move," a claim Washington has forcefully and rightly dismissed.

And yet, it isn't the tear that makes the scene of Private Silas Trip's flogging so heartbreaking; it's everything else Washington is doing in the moment, which stands starkly and diametrically opposed to that small bit of sentimentality. It's a devastating portrait of a man in a single, unblinking glance, and it turned a theater kid from upstate New York into a movie star. It's why, among other reasons, we keep returning to Glory after all these decades.

Released 35 years ago this month, Glory remains arguably the greatest movie ever made about the American Civil War. And Washington is one of the chief architects of the movie's legacy. Already a talented Broadway actor when he was cast in the film, Washington had previously made in-roads in Hollywood after doing phenomenal work in Norman Jewison's adaptation of A Soldier's Story in 1984 and starring in Richard Attenborough's well-meaning, but far more dated biopic, Cry Freedom (1987). The latter was a movie that turned the life of the murdered anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko into something of a white savior narrative about his biographer.

Admittedly, Glory came close to making similar mistakes. While beautifully written by Civil War buff Kevin Jarre (also a forgotten, unsung hero on Tombstone), Jarre made no secret about how he was inspired to write the film by a famed monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Boston Common. It is the same gallant work of art which is revealed in intimate detail during Glory's ending credits.