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Old October 14th, 2020 #1
steven clark
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Dec 2003
Posts: 2,277
Default Waterloo

I caught this on YouTube, having missed it in the movie house in 1970, when it was released. It's about the famous battle, with Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington.

The movie was directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, who directed the War and Peace a few years earlier, and like that film's great scope of battles, Bondarchuk did the same with Waterloo. I enjoyed the sweep of the armies, and there's no CGI here; when you see thousands of troops in line or hundreds of them form squares to hold off cavalry, that's the real thing, courtesy of the Soviet army, which 15,000 of them were used, from infantry to cavalry, and it looks it.

It shows what the scope of Napoleonic battles must have been like, and it was understandable that Napoleon could lose touch of his army.

Steiger's Napoleon is at turns cynical and moody, prone to rants, but so was Napoleon. Plummer's Wellington is cool and stiff, pretty much what he was like.

The original film was four hours long, far too long for a movie then, so a lot of cuts were made, but it doesn't look hacked up; just that a lot of things that could have been explained (the Prussians get two brief scenes; in actuality, they kind of saved Wellington), but it was a movie with a lot of action and scope. It kind of makes you cringe when you realize that many generals in WWI still saw these huge set piece battles as what they strove for, disregarding the machine-gun and modern artillery, making that war such a slaughter.

of course, Napoleon was pretty good at slaughter without modern weapons,
and as Wellington said, the only thing worse then a battle lost is a battle won.
Waterloo captures this, and was almost the last of a string of historical films the sixties had in abundance.
 
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