Just recently, I watched the 1970 film "Waterloo", starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington. The work was produced by Dino de Laurentiis, and is an account of the pivotal 1815 battle.
I had seen the film on a couple of occasions as a youngster, but decided to revisit it because of my recent study of the Napoleonic era.
The movie opens with a resume of Napoleon's original downfall, abdication and exile to Elba, as well as his dramatic return and reassumption of the reins of power. The rest of the film is devoted to the build-up to Waterloo, and to the battle itself.
Visually, the film is stunning, as would perhaps be anticipated for a de Laurentiis epic. The visuals are ideally complemented by the music.
Steiger gives a superb performance, perfectly capturing Bonaparte's volatility and passion. By contrast, Plummer seemed the ideal choice to embody the cool and aloof Wellington. There is also an excellent supporting cast of character actors, and a cameo for Orson Welles as King Louis.
Although diligent scholars will doubtless detect inaccuracies, both historical and military, overall the film probably takes fewer liberties in these areas than most others of its genre. The battle scenes are suitably elaborate and dramatic, if slightly unrealistic in places. To their credit, the producers do not entirely shy away from the horrors of war in their portrayal of the fighting.
To view the film again in its entirety after a number of years gave me a renewed appreciation of its merits. It remains an accessible, compelling but also reasonably definitive account of its subject.
I don't deny this film is well made and Plummer and Steiger do the best with what they got (though Steiger probably gets too dramatic at times), but I honestly feel that is it. The film is not afraid to show the deaths of many men, but none of the deaths have much emotional resonance because they tend to befall characters we are not attached to – from a storytelling POV, it shows the weight of the situation, which is good (and a bold move as trying to make it anti-war), but while i praise the film for making bold choices in its violent moments and number of deaths … to me it comes across as simultaneously not so bold as no one you’re emotionally attached to gets killed – there’s no gut punch of a death, because I never got to know Thomas Picton, William Howe De Lancey, or James Hay, Lord Hay, which would have been fitting for a film of this tone and level of violence. Strangely, although they acknowledge Henry Paget, 2nd Earl of Uxbridge losing his leg, we never see him again. I also felt, considering we see the set up to the battle with Napoleon's return, an proper epilogue could even have sufficed, or just having Wellington and Uxbridge having a heart to heart, despite Uxbridge losing his leg, with Napoleon being exiled on St. Helena to live with the torment from seeing all of what his life has been leading up to being tossed away must've been devastating. It would be a torment to know that once again and this time, forever knew that his power was gone, and his life was bound to an island just as unimportant as him.. But alas no …It’s a shame, because the amount of work and research was well done, it is just that to me that you don't get to know the characters much to build attachments to them. Even more of a shame considering "Tora! Tora! Tora", a similar film which was made to be accurate as possible and tell it as was from both sides and presented the Americans and Japanese as real people, as the attack on Pearl Harbor happens, and trusted the audience to appreciate them as such.
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