Word: napoleone
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...busy at the real thing to throw much paraphernalia into make-believe, Director Vladimir Petrov and his associates boil their war down pretty close to its essence: a duel of mind and spirit between Napoleon, who understood little except warfare, and the apparently sleepy Field Marshal Kutuzov, who understood his country and his people so profoundly that he all but embodied them. It was Kutuzov almost alone who realized that a Napoleon who had attained his goal, yet could neither engage in battle nor negotiate peace, was only a demoralized, helpless trespasser...
Much of this subtly simple story is told through leisured close-ups of faces so well cast, in the Moscow Art Theater tradition, that they embody nations, passions, methods, doubts, like great restrained cartoons. These faces discuss the situation, and advance the story, with considerable dramatic intelligence. Napoleon's occupation of Moscow, and his catastrophic retreat, are child's play compared with their handling in Tolstoy's great novel War and Peace. But the retreat does have a certain grandeur, resembling that of the florid, romantic, 19th-Century military art from which its cinematic style is apparently...
...disorganization. In 48 hours, the two-ply Siegfried Line at Aachen was broken in five places. Even with inadequate forces, a well organized enemy should have been able to hold that strong position for at least two weeks. Western Germany had been successfully invaded for the first time since Napoleon.* The soil of the Rhineland, Germany's storied, sacred frontier, lay just beyond...
Emil Ludwig, portly, popular German refugee biographer (Napoleon, Beethoven), scandalized a large Los Angeles convocation of musicians and intellectuals. Ludwig, invited to pinch-hit for Orson Welles at the meeting (sponsored jointly by U.C.L.A. and the ultra-liberal Musicians Congress), had not been asked for advance copies of his speech on "The Function of Music in a Democracy." Said he: "We find that music and the arts are not necessarily characteristic of Democracy. In fact, the greatest music that has ever been composed was done so under tyrants. . . ." He mentioned Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Liszt, Franck, Tchaikovsky, Schubert - all subjects...
...summer of 1862, a Union cavalry patrol galloping by the deserted station of Beaver Dam, Va. almost rode down a meek-looking little Confederate scout day dreaming in the sun. In his haversack they found a single, unimportant-looking letter and a newly-published copy of Napoleon's Maxims of War. Unimpressed, they read and destroyed the letter, sent the scout off to jail in Washington...