Word: napoleons
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...violence are the stunt-men's wives. He has transformed Christian anger into adolescent braying. He has made a hard-driving piece of sensationalist entertainment, but the only serious subject I see Kubrick able to cope with after it is military history. He's currently prepping a film on Napoleon...
Nothing Oldenburg does is lacking in irony-and this includes his wish to make monuments. The traditional language of monuments was heroic-Napoleon gesturing on a marble plinth festooned with trophies and Graces, or Verrocchio's statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni raking his bronze eyes across a conquered piazza from his striding horse. The monumental hero is, actually and metaphorically, bigger than life. But to make one, there has to be some belief in heroes, and there must be something to celebrate...
...result is schematic tedium. Napoleon (played by English Actor Kenneth Haigh) has nothing to do, and the script leaves him nothing to say or think. The plot, such as it is, consists of four strands: the foiled escape; the efforts of the garrison commander (Richardson) to move his prisoner from a damp villa to an even damper one; a couple of perfunctory sexual bouts by Napoleon with a married woman (Billie Whitelaw) and a 17-year-old groupie; and some dotty politicking (sample: "I want Vienna!") with Lord Sissal, who is making a deal to restore Napoleon to France...
Gielgud with straw hat and cigar plays Sissal as a lickerish hybrid of Winston Churchill and Malcolm Muggeridge. Cackling over the edge of a tub in which the Emperor is playing a nude scene, he tells Napoleon: "Talleyrand once told me you had four women in one night." This indeed is the stuff of history...
...left with two hours of Napoleon sitting in his villas, suffering cardiac spasms-a mild attack while mounting Billie Whitelaw, a worse one while mounting a horse-and grinding out fatuities like "Power is my art; I love it the way a musician loves his instrument." The routine virtuosity of good professional actors fills the gaps-but only with the kind of narcissism that mocks the story. No eagle, caged or free, could survive this taxidermy...