Word: napoleonism
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...Napoleon--Thursday-Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m.; Metropolitan Center...
...Napoleon [Metropolitan Center]: Abel Gance's long lost cinematic leviathan may well be the War and Peace of the screen. With four-and-a-half hours of film, a new score written and conducted by Francis Ford Coppola's father and played by a 60-piece orchestra, and a three-screen panoramic ending, it may be the biggest thing since The Seventh Seal--or may be even Edison, for crissake...
...suit the most wide-eyed space opera: an imaginative English lad finds six dwarfs tumbling out of his bedroom closet one night and accompanies them on their adventures through time and space. But the movie undercuts any involvement in the tale by stopping dead for long derisory skits featuring Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese) and Agamemnon (Sean Connery). It misuses Holm's talents, underuses Cleese's and doesn't use Connery at all-there's no way to turn him into a figure of antic misanthropy. The film finally regains its footing, with...
...movie becomes episodic, as the elfish ones drag the honest, clearerheaded (and, by a few inches, taller) boy from time zone to time zone; yet unlike Dorothy's tribulations in Oz, each seems chosen for comical rather than didactic purpose. The first era represents Napoleon (Ian Holm) as a silly drunk, obsessed with height and puppets instead of the conquest of Italy. Holm is awkwardly funny in a sort of ludicrous, obvious way, not even bothering to sustain a French accent. Agamemnon (Sean Connery, looking at once--and for once--agacious, fatherly, and mischievous), is concerned more with magic tricks...
Another unfortunate consequence of the Barrier Act was to encourage the French to try to push their frontier east of the Mississippi. The Emperor Napoleon had been tempted to sell all of France's New World holdings-for as little as ? 3 million-but Jefferson, that consummate troublemaker, convinced him not only to keep his 828,000 square miles but to populate them with the landless peasants of France and Southern Europe. If it had not been for Jefferson-non piangere per me, indeed!-America, our British America, might now extend from the Atlantic to the Rocky Mountains...