Waterloo (1970)

I'm about to slip on my water wings and tread on into touchy international waters with the following declaration: not every foreign war movie is good, or important...or even necessary.

And one of the worst offenders of this idea are The Napoleonic Wars.

Who cares about The Napoleonic Wars anyway?  Well, the French, I guess.  And anyone else who just has to watch anything that has Napoleon in it...or anyone with a big funny black hat.

I don't know what it is but it seems every incarnation of Naploeon "The Little General" Bonaparte and his campaign for military immortality collapses under the weight of its own subject matter.

No, you're right: movies like Time Bandits and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure had our short superior officer in it, and they were more than successful.  They were generally comedies, though.  I guess it stands to reason that any film that refuses to take Napoleon seriously is in the right.

Why?  Apparently we've been conditioned to believe that because every delusional nutcase in a  movie, TV show or cartoon is going to think they're ol' Boney, walking around with those big funny hats and their hand stuck in their shirt, the characterization of Nappy as an insane-with-power megalomaniac is a given.

Therefore, any movie that tries to take him seriously is going to fail because we - the audience - are going to go in and expect a comedy...and we're gonna be quite disappointed when we don't get one.

Oh, I've seen a couple of serious meditations on our Military Crepe Suzette in films like the 1955 French film simply called Napoléon, a film with a big cast and so well-revered, apparently, that I was able to find a copy at my local dollar store.  It wasn't very good. 

Then there was a 1927 silent film directed by no less a master of the craft than Abel Gance, also called Napoleon.  It was re-released in the early Eighties and was a smash hit because, from what I gather, of the virtue of it being a re-discovered and re-released silent movie.  Never saw this one.  It might have been good....

However, for all I know, Abel might have been able to pull off a rarity in a world where the norm is the movie that I present to you today.

What makes Waterloo such a fallen souffle?  A couple of things: for one, we have another international co-production on our hands, this one between Italy and The Soviet Union (that's Russia, for those of you born after perestroika), which has the feel of both Laurel AND Hardy directing the same short subject.  Blindfolded.

And also, the star is a man for whom moderation and restraint were just the extra-point words in Scrabble: one Rod Steiger.  Yes, he was a fantastic actor. Won awards and dazzled in The Pawnbroker and In The Heat Of The Night.  However, his casting as Napoleon Bonaparte became one of the most....

Well, I'll get to that, but right now let's get to the matter at hand: After defeating France and imprisoning Napoleon (Steiger) on Elba, ending two decades of war, Europe and Louis XVIII (Orson Welles) are both shocked to find The Bone Man has flown ze coupe and caused the French Army to defect from the King back to him.  Whoopsie.  The best of the British generals, the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer), had previously defeated Nap's best generals in Spain and Portugal, but has never faced The Short Soldier himself.  With a rag-tag makeshift conglomeration of an Anglo-Allied army to lead along with armed Prussians, Wellington stands between Napoleon and Shorty's supremacy, whereas an allied victory could bring long term peace to Europe. The deciding battlefield: Little Big Horn!  Nah, just kidding - it's Waterloo...but the comparison's the same.

Now there's nothing like a straightforward war story - even historic ones can give us the quality of a  well-mounted history lesson that would certainly give students enough to take notes on in class.  And director Sergei Bondarchuk manages to give us a lavish, spacious view of war and epic battles on the scale of Gone With The Wind or Doctor Zhivago (probably more of one than the other).

The problem is that Sergei is best remembered as the director who gave the world (or at least The Soviet Union) the massive seven hour-plus adaptation of the classic Leo Tolstoy book War And Peace, technically one of the most expensive movies ever made - cha-chinging in at $100 million dollars (which was a lot of rubles back in the Sixties).  However, it doesn't count because it was all subsidized by the Soviet government, meaning they picked up Sergei's tab and everything...you know, like Canada gave their film-makers tax breaks to create masterpieces like Gas, Utilities and Falling In Love Again.

Bondarchuk, however, didn't have such a luxury this time out since Big Comrade wasn't watching and able to keep everything under wraps.  See, way back when, War And Peace was a home-team project not meant to be scrutinized for all its bookkeeping practices outside of Red Square.  Waterloo, also having to be shared with La Italia, became a somewhat more public affair, with its budget looming near $25 million - still only a quarter of War And Peace's bill, but nevertheless a huge amount for any movie in 1970, especially when being shared by The Boot Country...where would they get their money to make the next 15 peplum epics? 

Bondarchuk also co-wrote this, along with writers Vittorio Bonicelli (who also worked on Barberella, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and a pretty interesting 1986 movie about Jesus' trial and resurrection called The Inquiry) and H.A.L. Craig (Anzio, Fraulein Doktor, Lion Of The Desert and The Message...yes, I know; another movie for another time).  So along with the idea that there were three people wiriting this movie, it works about as well if they each wrote theri own version of the same story, then mixed up the pages.  Dramatic disjointment comes and goes, dialogue made up of historic soundbytes and broad characterizations make for a story that seems more like a "greatest hits" collection of scenes than an actual film.

Anyway, this was $25 million buckaroos being spent on big-scale battles, intricatlely-choreographed troop movements shown from high overhead shots, gigantic crowd scenes and armies shown in all their lavish widescreen glory, along with men in ornate uniforms and ladies in detailed ball gowns talking about various government-and-war-related topics in meticulously decorated rooms....think it made back its budget?  Nyet; over-compensation meets over-budgeting and duke it out for supremacy, and no one wins.

Thing is, we have a pretty good cast here; including such respected actors as Dan O'Herlihy (whom most readers of this blog will more readily remember as The Old Man who owned most of New Detroit or the lizard-skinned alien who helped Alex Rogan to battle Zur and the Ko'Dan Armada) and some guy named Orson Welles (who was also featured in the 1955 film as a bit player...he did that a lot).  No slouches as far as acting goes; especially seeing as how these men took their responsibilities seriously, treating Waterloo as a serious subject.  Bless their trusting little hearts.

None more so that Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington: this was a good part for any actor, seeing as in real life this particular Duke had quite the interesting life with many a battle fought against those Frenchies.  Not to mention the fact that all this clash of politics, ego, detailed planning and incredible amounts of fighting, in-fighting, disagreements and final controlled chaos made up quite the interesting little story about a man who would later rise to prominence in England's world of politics and leadership.  To say that Plummer embodies such a man is only scratching the surface; after all, he could pull of being The Emperor Of The Universe in only a day's worth of performance (StarCrash) - to be an actual historical figure is a snap.  And Plummer does a smashing job.

Then we have the matter of Rod Steiger.  At this point in his life, having won Oscars, BAFTAs, Davids, Globes, Laurels, Sheckys and Lulus, there was no living with him or the over-inflated opinion of his own creative soul.  He demanded much of his films and those who dare cast him in them.  He had a craft to hone, and creating Napoleon as he does here was apparently a 24/7 job.  A real hard one too, seeing that it looks like he's on the verge of suffering a major aneurysm every moment he's onscreen.  Intensity in your role is usually a good thing...but not when it's your over-riding performance!

Don't get me wrong; Steiger does a good enough job as he dramatically addresses the troops at Elba before departing, and there are small quiet moments here and there where he doesn't say a word...but then he opens his mouth and hams out more effectively than Porky Pig, Babe and Gordy in a sausage factory.  I don't really know a better way to put it, seeing that Waterloo doesn't even care enough about its star's performance to bother keeping enough film in the camera to record him.  But I guess that's more the fault of producer Dino De Laurentiis than it is the fault of....

Wait.  Wait, WHAT???

Dino De Laurentiis produced a war history drama longer than 90 minutes?  Based on his involvement, I would have expected Charles Bronson to play Nappy, Martin Balsam as The Duke Of Wellington and a special cameo by Grant Cramer (you don't know him, never mind...).  Besides which, this is one of Dino's grabs at respectability, producing a film that has more bankable elements in it than your average direct-to-video cop action drama.  Oh, he did this more than once; look at Battle Of The Bulge, The Bible, Serpico, Three Days Of The Condor, Ragtime...oh, and he also produced Bondarchuk's War And Peace, too! 

I guess it was all because Dino wanted to be taken seriously...the man who gave us 1976's King Kong, Amityville II: The Possession, Dune and Orca.  He wanted to be taken seriously with an overblown 2-hour PLUS movie about a battle where the lead actor wanted more attention to him than to the story itself.

No prizes for guessing that this movie didn't even make back HALF of its budget.  Waterloo didn't even earn $2 million of its $25 million tab, and there's a good reason for that: being released in 1970, in the midst of the Vietnam conflict, the last thing anyone wanted to see was a movie that gave the viewer a detailed account of YET ANOTHER war.  In fact, the only movies that did well in the same time period were Robert Altman's M*A*S*H and Franklin J. Schaffner's Patton.  Of course, I have the feeling that they succeeded where Waterloo failed due to the fact that its makers realized heroism and bravado in the face of certain death is not a subject that can be taken seriously...especially when bueracracy is a governing factor.

Everybody moved on (especially De Laurentiis), but maybe not Bondarchuk and Steiger.  One of them would never again direct as large a movie as this and certainly would never be trusted with as gargantuan a budget, and another would never again have their star burn so hot.  This wasn't just a fall from grace, it was a nose dive off the Sears Tower.

Then again, maybe Steiger read the whole script all the way through first, and then realized the only way for this movie to succeed was to downplay the story.

Or maybe Rod was just a raging egomaniac who believed in his own awesomeness, no matter what the circumstance.

Either way, Waterloo had at least one thing going for it: it was aptly named.