Word: napoleons
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Before leaving for Paris, Heath told a conference of conservative women in London's Westminster Hall: "We face a momentous test of will." The result of that test, he went on, would answer the question: "Do we have the wisdom to achieve by construction and cooperation what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve by destruction and conquest...
...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...
...teeth and bayonets, burst from the woods to end the battle. As they do, the score blares a Haydn anthem. The theme, Bondarchuk is well aware, became the melody for Deutschland über Alles. The subtlety of that touch matches H.A.L. Craig's screenplay and Steiger's Napoleon...