Napoleonic battles

Press, 4 August 1987, Page 32

Napoleonic battles

By

DAVID CLARKSON

On an afternoon and evening in June, 1815, three armies gathered in a corner of Belgium probably no bigger than Christchurch’s North Hagley Park and decided the fate of Europe. “Waterloo,” the 1970 film that recreates the drama of that amazing day is out on video, released by R.C.A., Columbia and Hoyts. It is a film that made no attempt to scale down the spectacle to fit the screen or the budget. The battlefield was rebuilt, with its scattered buildings of La Haye Sainte, Hougoumont and La Belle Alliance, and then 20,000 Red Army soldiers were sent into battle by the Russian director, Sergei Bondarchuk.

The climatic battle takes up the last half of this two-hour film. It is packed with incident from a battle that has been under the microscope for 172 years. History has left a rich legacy of accounts of that day, including memorable conversations which have been worked into the script. The film shows the battle from the point of view of the commanders, as well as of the soldiers in the thick of the fighting. Largely, the action appears on screen as the fighting men would have seen it, except for a sequence when Bondarchuk succumbs to the temptation to show the scale of his achievement and resorts to some aerial shots of the battlefield. The film opens with Napoleon’s escape from exile on Elba and his return to France, gathering his beloved army about him as he marches on Paris. Orson Welles makes a corpulent appearance as King Louis

XVIII, bidding his staff farewell as he steals away from the palace through a rain-sodden night, bound for safety. Rod Steiger plays Napoleon as a deposed emperor tired from the years of struggle. The performance captures his uncertain ability to shape his own destiny. His adversary is Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, played by Christopher Plummer. The physical resemblance is interesting — more so than Steiger’s Napoleon — and the writers have packed the film with all his best lines from the history books, including his observation on his own soldiers: “I don’t know what effect they will have on the enemy, but my God, they frighten me.” The film has 80 actors in speaking roles including Jack Hawkins as the unfortunate General Picton, and Virginia McKenna as the Duchess of Richmond.

Filming took place near the Czech and Hungarian borders. Apart from the buildings, the technicians also created the roads and grain fields that played a part in the struggle. The attention to detail was microscopic, with the vast array of uniforms that had to be recreated in enormous numbers. ' Completing the Napoleonic flavour of its latest releases, RCA/Columbia/ Hoyts has put out the three-part “War and Peace” epic by Bondarchuk, based on Leu Tolstoy’s famous novel. The English-language version will run in total almost six hours, though the Russian versions run on for yet another 222y 2 hours. The first part, “Austerlitz,” tells of the great

battle there in 1805, when Napoleon’s forces met the armies of Europe. The Russian officer, Prince Andre Bolkonski, is seriously wounded and returns to Russia, where his wife dies in childbirth. Part one also recounts his meeting with the young Natasha, the other central character. The story takes the characters through the 1812 invasion of Russia by the French, with the great battle at Borodino in the second part. The film’s publicity material boasts that the production used 20,000 costumes, with 120,000 men taking part in “the biggest battles ever filmed in the history of movie making.” For Bondarchuk, “War and Peace” was two years work. It was to bring him the Order of Lenin and an Academy Award, and it was to be a spectacular test run for the Waterloo battle sequences two years later. Bondarchuk was born in the Ukraine in 1920 and served in the Red Army during World War 11. After studying drama in Rostov and Moscow, he acted in his first film in 1948, and went on to perform in a string of successes. He was given his first opportunity to direct in 1959. “War and Peace” is probably his most renowned work. He also acted in the film and worked on the screenplay.