The case is known: after Jesus Christ, Napoleon accumulated the most copious filmography in the history of the seventh art.
From 1895 to the present day, the multitude of films devoted to him is as large as the character, who totals some seven hundred appearances on the big screen.
Defeat obliges, Waterloo only represents the bare minimum portion.
However, from the silent era, Alfred Machin filmed in Brussels and on the very scene of the battle
An episode of Waterloo
and
The Emperor's Kiss (1913), with Fernand Crommelynck, the future author of The
Magnificent Cuckold
, in the cast.
.
The same year, it was the British Charles Weston who set about it, this time restoring the flat country in the plains of Northampton.
Grandiose,
The Battle of Waterloo
offers England its first blockbuster film.
Naturally, cinema is dependent on historiographical disputes.
Anxious to reestablish the importance of General Blücher, director Karl Grune did not take half measures: his
Waterloo
(
Waterloo, eine Zeitbild
, 1929), shot in Munich and in the Isar valley, reduced to insignificance of Wellington's role.
It is difficult to resist the retrospective temptation to see in it the warlike manifesto of Germany between the wars.
Grune, however, limited the propaganda there, even entrusting the role of Napoleon to the very French Charles Vanel, still at the dawn of a career which was to last seventy-eight years.
From one defeat to another
On the other hand, politics takes the lion's share in
The Hundred Days
(
Campo di maggio
) by Giovacchino Forzano, the first Waterloo of talking cinema.
“Napoleon seen by Benito Mussolini”
: the French poster leaves no doubt about the true instigator of this Italian-German co-production produced in 1934. It was indeed the Duce, a great admirer of Napoleon, who suggested and perhaps co-wrote with Forzano the eponymous play, performed in Rome in 1930. And it was his son, the very film buff Vittorio, who put together its screen adaptation, shot in two languages at the Pisorno studios in Tirrenia, in Colle di Val d'Elsa and the island of Elba.
Disappeared after the fall of fascism,
Les Cent Jours
was later found in an incomplete working copy, but which allows us to verify the clarity of its intentions: to designate parliamentarism as the enemy of a strong nation and to assimilate the destiny of Napoleon to that of the new leader of Italy, who also imagined himself abandoned by everyone but promised immortality.
Unfortunately for him, the story did not follow this scenario.
For the rest, the film stands out for the attention paid to the narration of the day of June 18, of which it reproduces the main events much more faithfully than its predecessors.
For nearly forty years, Waterloo was largely absent from the Napoleonic epic in the cinema.
Its resurrection is the work of the ambitious Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, who in 1970 entrusted the Russian Sergei Bondarchuk with the care and means of producing the reference work on the Emperor's last battle.
Taking the abdication of 1814 as its starting point,
Waterloo
takes up the gauntlet with breathtaking brilliance, which also owes to its performers: Rod Steiger is an unexpected Napoleon, whose palpable unease faithfully translates the Emperor in his last battle , and Christopher Plummer lends Wellington his nuanced performance, wonderfully British in spirit.
Despite the care taken in the reconstruction, carried out in Ukraine with the help of 20,000 soldiers and cavalrymen from the Red Army and the Yugoslav army, Waterloo brought in barely a million and a half dollars for the 25 million that 'it had cost.
By a singular mirror effect, the historical failure of Napoleon extended to his cinematographic double, discouraging Stanley Kubrick from putting together the titanic film dedicated to the Emperor on which he had been working for two years.
We should always be wary of defeats.