Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Collectors and souvenir hunters have always been inspired by strange and esoteric impulses. A lock of Napoleon's hair, which even Josephine would not have given a sou for, can today fetch upwards of $200. A frying pan used by Britain's "Great Train Robbers" when they were hiding out in a Midlands farmhouse in 1963 recently went for $120. Even so, the mania for Hitleriana is an especially puzzling phenomenon. In the past year, sales of Third Reich mementos have begun to rise sharply. A few of the collectors are old diehard Nazis like a former...
...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...
...years, four gilded bronze horses have majestically guarded St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice. The horses survived Napoleon's looting armies and two world wars, but not the dirty air generated by petrochemical plants on Venice's mainland. The bronze is now so pitted and weakened that the horses must be removed from St. Mark's Square. Humans are removing themselves as well. The young in particular are fleeing, and Venice may soon resemble a crumbling geriatric ward...