Rhapsodies

For this week’s selection, I watch films about Napoleon Bonaparte.

The first on my list, Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo, was a film that I had heard mixed things about. On one side I definitely heard that lots of people like that thinking of it as an epic and historically accurate production of the Battle of Waterloo. On the other hand, I heard that it flopped in 1970.

Now it was time for me to see for myself.

Waterloo starts with Napoleon (Ron Steiger) exiled to the island of Elba. Nine months later he’s back and pigs control over France again. With the forces of Europe against him, he leads his army to Brussels where the English troops are gathered. know, it’s up to The Duke of  Wellington (Christopher Plummer) to stop him once and for all. But with such a force against him is there a chance?

Count me as one of the people who like this movie. This was an incredible epic spectacle which has which history has forgiven. The scale of this is just breathtaking with the arm both armies played by Soviet soldiers. It was a joke at the time that the director was in control of the six largest army in the world. Looking at it this does not appear to be an exaggeration.

Steiger is fantastic is Napoleon playing him up as a hyperactive larger than life mix of ego and intellect. Plummer as Wellington is the complete opposite, a very proper, but sarcastic, British gentleman with ice running through his veins. Who will do what it takes in order to win? Together the contrast is amazing.

If I have one problem with it, it is that by definition half the film consists of only one fight scene.

The next film on my list, Antoine de Caunes’s Monsieur N, was one I hadn’t even heard of until I was doing my research and the page about Napolean films, I was looking at, claimed it was the best of the lot.

This British-French bilingual tells the story of Napoleon’s imprisonment in St. Helena from the point of view of a British lieutenant (Jay Rodan) who is one of his jailers. It also suggests an interesting little conspiracy theory that instead of dying in St Helen, Napoleon eventually escaped from the island using a body double and lived out the rest of his life in Louisiana with the British none what the wiser.

I mostly enjoy this film, at least the first half Philippe Torreton does a very good job as Napoleon playing him as someone who is living in the past, but at the same time, he is sure of himself at all times preserving the loyalty of his handful of remaining followers who went into exile. The rest of the cast is a wonderful ensemble of character actors I never heard of most notably Richard E. Grant as Major-General Sir Hudson Lowe the overzealous governor who sees himself as Napolean’s nemesis but in reality is terribly outclassed. My only real problem with it is it kind of loses its momentum in the second half and the premise of Napoleon’s hypothetical escape feels more than a little far-fetched.

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