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Because I responded to it so strongly, I'm trying to wrap my head around and contextualize the poor initial reception to Sergey Bondarchuk's Waterloo, his depiction of the famous battle made around four years after his War and Peace adaptation. As a biopic of Napoleon, it doesn't offer a whole lot of insight into his subject. Early on, the movie halfheartedly posits the notion that Napoleon had to be defeated because he was offensive to the bourgeois officer class, something Christopher Plummer's Duke of Wellington, first seen slathered in ghoulish make-up, practically says out loud. "On the field of battle his hat is worth fifty thousand men, but he is not a gentleman." Indeed, the movie contrasts Napoleon's fierce, driven nature with the decadence implied by the girth of Orson Welles, in a brief but well cast role as Louis the XVIII. (This helps us grasp why the French army can be seen betraying their king and joining his side, even without showing him to be especially charismatic.) But then as we cut between Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington as they spend time with their respective armies, seeing some of the rituals they both observe, and sense that they are perhaps not so different after all. Bondarchuk isn't terribly interested in mining his subject for psychological depth, but he does seem to identify with both Napoleon and Wellington as generals, orchestrators of vast logistical feats on a scale that his own films attempt to mirror. (It's worth pointing out that Rod Steiger, cast as Napoleon, strongly resembles Bondarchuk himself while Plummer resembles Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played one of the heroes in War and Peace.) When Napoleon has moments of self-doubt in his narration, we suspect it mirrors Bondarchuk's own in mounting this production.
There's also the fact that the movie covers similar territory as War and Peace, which had only been released a few years earlier and also includes recreations of Napoleonic warfare. I guess the novelty might have worn off, especially in an era when the market for such large-scale productions had begun to dwindle. But viewed now, when movies regularly cheat to exceed such a scale through special effects to the point that it loses meaning, seeing something real and tactile play out at this size offers an increasingly rare thrill. To get a sense of the film's maddening scale, we can look at the hard numbers of the production. 17,000 extras (borrowed from the Soviet Army, whose assistance he had again), two hills bulldozed away, five miles of road laid, five thousand trees planted, six miles of underground piping laid to create the muddy battlefield conditions depicted. But it's one thing to list out stats and another to see the results onscreen, and like War and Peace, this offers no shortage of images like masses of soldiers disappearing into the horizon where the scale is precisely the point. On the whole this is more formally conservative work than that film, lacking the sheer stylistic abandon offered by the filters, superimpositions and weird editing choices deployed in the former, but it shares its fluid sense of screen composition, with many shots where smoke erupting from gunfire or cannonballs or changing troop formations abruptly alter the character of the image.
This movie also reminded me of Zulu, which purposefully had a rote first half setting up a host of cliches to be torn down by the extended battle sequence of the second half, where warfare serves as storytelling. Perhaps unintentionally, the first half here sets up the historical events in question as remote and unfeeling and then tries to place us in the characters' shoes as directly as possible in bringing them to life in the second half. When one of Napoleon's officers makes a strategic blunder in sending an unassisted cavalry charge against the rectangular formations of Wellington's army, Bondarchuk lifts the camera to the sky to let us see from above the implications of that decision and perhaps grasp Napoleon's thinking. I understand there are historical inaccuracies, and that Bondarchuk's meticulousness in this respect is more artistically than historically driven, but as my knowledge of the events captured roughly extend to the first line of ABBA's "Waterloo", I have no interest in fact-checking. That song also captures the tenuous nature of victory which he attempts to evoke with how the events unfold. ("I feel like I win when I lose.") There's the sense that Bondarchuk is conducting this like a piece of music, where the individual strategic maneuvers accumulate into a kind of crescendo. (That might not be the best analogy, but as my meager musical knowledge has been lost to the ages, it'll have to do.)
Quite frankly, I think the battle is thrilling enough on its own to make the movie worth seeing, but while I don't think the movie offers a lot of insight into Napoleon directly, I do think it holds plenty of interest when framed as the relationship Bondarchuk has with the figures and events in question. But yes, the battle is tremendous and, if you can tolerate the film's weaknesses in other areas, pushes Waterloo into a kind of unwieldy greatness.
Waterloo (Bondarchuk, 1970)
Because I responded to it so strongly, I'm trying to wrap my head around and contextualize the poor initial reception to Sergey Bondarchuk's Waterloo, his depiction of the famous battle made around four years after his War and Peace adaptation. As a biopic of Napoleon, it doesn't offer a whole lot of insight into his subject. Early on, the movie halfheartedly posits the notion that Napoleon had to be defeated because he was offensive to the bourgeois officer class, something Christopher Plummer's Duke of Wellington, first seen slathered in ghoulish make-up, practically says out loud. "On the field of battle his hat is worth fifty thousand men, but he is not a gentleman." Indeed, the movie contrasts Napoleon's fierce, driven nature with the decadence implied by the girth of Orson Welles, in a brief but well cast role as Louis the XVIII. (This helps us grasp why the French army can be seen betraying their king and joining his side, even without showing him to be especially charismatic.) But then as we cut between Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington as they spend time with their respective armies, seeing some of the rituals they both observe, and sense that they are perhaps not so different after all. Bondarchuk isn't terribly interested in mining his subject for psychological depth, but he does seem to identify with both Napoleon and Wellington as generals, orchestrators of vast logistical feats on a scale that his own films attempt to mirror. (It's worth pointing out that Rod Steiger, cast as Napoleon, strongly resembles Bondarchuk himself while Plummer resembles Vyacheslav Tikhonov, who played one of the heroes in War and Peace.) When Napoleon has moments of self-doubt in his narration, we suspect it mirrors Bondarchuk's own in mounting this production.
There's also the fact that the movie covers similar territory as War and Peace, which had only been released a few years earlier and also includes recreations of Napoleonic warfare. I guess the novelty might have worn off, especially in an era when the market for such large-scale productions had begun to dwindle. But viewed now, when movies regularly cheat to exceed such a scale through special effects to the point that it loses meaning, seeing something real and tactile play out at this size offers an increasingly rare thrill. To get a sense of the film's maddening scale, we can look at the hard numbers of the production. 17,000 extras (borrowed from the Soviet Army, whose assistance he had again), two hills bulldozed away, five miles of road laid, five thousand trees planted, six miles of underground piping laid to create the muddy battlefield conditions depicted. But it's one thing to list out stats and another to see the results onscreen, and like War and Peace, this offers no shortage of images like masses of soldiers disappearing into the horizon where the scale is precisely the point. On the whole this is more formally conservative work than that film, lacking the sheer stylistic abandon offered by the filters, superimpositions and weird editing choices deployed in the former, but it shares its fluid sense of screen composition, with many shots where smoke erupting from gunfire or cannonballs or changing troop formations abruptly alter the character of the image.
This movie also reminded me of Zulu, which purposefully had a rote first half setting up a host of cliches to be torn down by the extended battle sequence of the second half, where warfare serves as storytelling. Perhaps unintentionally, the first half here sets up the historical events in question as remote and unfeeling and then tries to place us in the characters' shoes as directly as possible in bringing them to life in the second half. When one of Napoleon's officers makes a strategic blunder in sending an unassisted cavalry charge against the rectangular formations of Wellington's army, Bondarchuk lifts the camera to the sky to let us see from above the implications of that decision and perhaps grasp Napoleon's thinking. I understand there are historical inaccuracies, and that Bondarchuk's meticulousness in this respect is more artistically than historically driven, but as my knowledge of the events captured roughly extend to the first line of ABBA's "Waterloo", I have no interest in fact-checking. That song also captures the tenuous nature of victory which he attempts to evoke with how the events unfold. ("I feel like I win when I lose.") There's the sense that Bondarchuk is conducting this like a piece of music, where the individual strategic maneuvers accumulate into a kind of crescendo. (That might not be the best analogy, but as my meager musical knowledge has been lost to the ages, it'll have to do.)
Quite frankly, I think the battle is thrilling enough on its own to make the movie worth seeing, but while I don't think the movie offers a lot of insight into Napoleon directly, I do think it holds plenty of interest when framed as the relationship Bondarchuk has with the figures and events in question. But yes, the battle is tremendous and, if you can tolerate the film's weaknesses in other areas, pushes Waterloo into a kind of unwieldy greatness.