Word: bondarchuk
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...Duke of Wellington may have believed that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Napoleon was sure that the French General Staff had failed him. Sergei Bondarchuk has another idea. Though the English and French exchanged considerable fire and shed small oceans of blood, they had very little to do with the outcome. The beau stratagem was performed by old General Blücher and his vindictive Prussians. They and they alone are responsible for the outcome in Waterloo, or, as its subtitle might read, History Revised for Anglophobes...
Russian Director Bondarchuk took a brief, withering look at Napoleon swallowed by the long Moscow winter in War and Peace. But that was on home grounds. This time, on western European turf, he rather favors the little Corsican with properly heroic proportions. But he gives the British aristocracy only the back of his hand. Every man Jack of them is portrayed as an arbitrary prig, none more so than Wellington (Christopher Plummer). Yet even these lead soldiers give more credible performances than Rod Steiger in his oppressive, self-congratulatory Napoleon. Scene after marching scene, every familiar Steigerian trick passes...
...Peace, Bondarchuk found himself at home with war and inept with peace. In Waterloo, he again directs less than he deploys. Psychological insight is conveyed by closeups of the stars' eyes, interminable crosscuts from the Duke of Wellington to Napoleon Bonaparte and fatuous "voiceover" soliloquies, like Napoleon's: "This Englishman has two qualities that I admire-caution, and above all courage...
...book, the war was only the background framing the twin heroes, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (played by Vyacheslav Tikhonov) and his friend Pierre Bezukhov (played by Director Bondarchuk), who represent the two faces of the aristocracy. The outlines of the plot are familiar even to those nonreaders who saw the 1956 miniversion, with Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, and Henry Fonda. Andrei, a sophisticate and soldier, is unable to alter his archaic sensibilities and perishes in the war. Pierre, muddling through the chaos around him, does nothing right, but because he has the capacity to grow and change, he survives. Between...
...after all the excesses and errors, considerable power abides. Tolstoy's book may not have been reliable as history or wholly satisfactory as fiction; yet it achieved, in the words of Tolstoy's biographer, Henri Troyat, "the majesty of a second Genesis." Bondarchuk's film catches part of that majesty by showing Mother Russia dressed in the 19th century's bloodstained finery, overshadowing her doomed, noble children. She, and she alone, is worth two trips to the movie house...