Purely Joyful Movie!

The first must-see film of the year.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I watched this movie for the first time in about 10 years today and one of the things that strikes me the most is how much more real it looks that the more recent war movies.CGI is great for many things, but often detail get overlooked. In this film, because they are actually moving extras around there are clouds of dust everywhere. When the cannon fire, the black powder persists. The film has a real sense all through it of the fog of war.On a personal note, I served in a Highland regiment, and it is a thrill to see a film where all of the kilts are not the same. The 92nd wear Gordon, Camerons wear Cameron of Erracht, and wonder of wonders both served at Waterloo.While the terrain shown in the film is nothing like the field, the strength of the film lies the in characterizations of Wellington and Napoleon. Both actors are at the top of their game, although some specifics are off (Wellington wasn't a aristocrat - more younger son of Anglo-Irish gentry).One of the things that I like about the film is the way the director has cut several times to show Napoleon and Wellington react to the same information. It does a great job of contrasting the differences and similarities of the two leaders.Visually the film was breathtaking when I first say it in 1970, and it remains so.

Fiction just doesn't cut it with history, history has forever told wilder stories than fiction, Napoleon's remarkable journey is exhibit A.The title says it all, it's about the battle of Waterloo and little else. Extra's by the tens of thousands leave you with no mystery of just how massive this battle really was, it's an ode to pre-CGI cinema and what we are missing out on today. It is truly is spectacular. I'm amazed they even attempted to pull it off.Historical accuracy when it comes to the order of battle is pretty damn close, however the terrain used for the film isn't as close as it could've been, add to that the fact that the ground was dusty and dry during filming, whereas in reality it was wet and soggy. A small error that the producers had no choice but to compromise.Plummer is excellent as arrogant and aristocratic Wellington and steals every scene he's in. Steiger is convincing enough as Napoleon but Plummer gets the gold medal in this movie.The battle sequences are really something to behold, but the rest of the movie is fairly by-the-book. Overall it's a very solid account of the Battle of Waterloo and it's short build-up.

The film is a bit of a high concept mess. You have to imagine the production team trying to figure out how to restage a "heroic" football game that went down in sports' legacy, because that's kind of what the battle of Waterloo is in military annals. The truth is that team competitions, including old style military field tactics, don't have much of a story to them. The action is the drama, not the individual soldiers themselves. As a young man I saw a re-edited version on TV, and like now, even after seeing a two hour version, I'm still at a loss as to the story.The acting is okay, if a bit overstated here and there. I actually worked with Rod Steiger many years ago, and he always struck me as exceptionally professional and a very caring individual. Having said that, I think he may have been misidrected as what he did here was to give the audience the power hungry "has-been" out to make a bid for a second chance at European dominance. It works after a fashion, but I think the performance gets overused. Napoleon, from all renditions I've seen of him, had his passions (and moments of rage), but he was also a strategist and tactician. Here Steiger shows us a Napoleon who is not so much a master tactician, but a kind of prodigal brat who shows us fury when pieces of his plan fail to fall into place. Steiger shows us a pensive man prone to fits. In this his acting really is unsurpassed, and he would reprise this character in Qadaffi's "Lion of the Desert".As for other performances, they all mostly hit their cues, but are hampered by an edit that is less than sterling. Plummer does an outstanding job of showing us a reserved Wellington, even if his expression does betray a somewhat impish actor trying to refrain from letting us in on how he gets into character. Others, including the actor who plays the Prince of Orange, do well, but sometimes let their inner Brit hold back a more vetted and thorough performance. Ergo there is a reserve in the thesping that works well, but also underscores the fact that we are watching a cast not of the nations contending for power in that period.Nearly every shot in act two is a battle sequence. The amount of artistry that went into staging the battle is superb, but ultimately what we get is a huge battle that is over acted, and not much drama, in spite of the interpersonal moments scattered here and there throughout the second act. It's pretty stunning to see the cavalry charges and Wellington's infantry forming square, but we're not privy to the actual maneuvers of the regiments on the field, nor why they were done. But, maybe the film makers are paying homage to the old notion that no battle plan lasts beyond initial contact with the enemy. Then again, maybe the lost third of the film would explain all those details.All in all the Hong Kong DVD edit that I have is a bit of an edited mess. You attach that to the fact that it is a Dino "b-grade-producer" De Laurentis flick, and you get something that looks like a high budgeted b-grade epic. My biggest critiques are as follows; Orson Wells as the King of France was a severe misstep. The camera work ranges from brilliant to poor. We gets zooms and pans in a number of shots. The exact kind of thing you want to avoid in films like this, and the film, as hampered as it is to begin with, suffers more for it, leaving a mess of a film that should have been one of the great epics shot at the time. My final critique is actually a bit of praise, and that is at least the producers actually got the size of the armies right, and could only do so by employing the only inexpensive Caucasian army around; the Soviet Union. That was a stroke of production genius, and we have the Kremlin to thank for getting the grandeur of the battle correct.Not a film I would readily recommend, but see it once if you're into historical epics. Missing footage equals missing story, which equals a film that could have been more, but ultimately falls flat as a total cinematic experience.

My third viewing of Waterloo was probably the best viewing of the film I had had.It appears this film gets slightly better every time it is seen.This really was one of the last huge battle epics that came from the 60's and early 70's. Rod Steiger plays Napoleon pretty well but it goes from French to English to American apart from that good portrayal of the trumped up little Frenchmen. The director Sergie Bondarchuk had filmed a similar film to this a year before called War and Peace.I see this as an unofficial sequel to War and Peace as it battles and ball room dances are similar in style. I was very happy to see Spaghetti Western legend in this film Gianni Garko who stared as Sartana the gambling gun slinger in countless films.Al so spotted in this film was Coronation Streets Fred Elliot but was refrained from saying "I want meat,I say I want meat.This film time is comfortable at roughly around 2 hours.A great score as well by Nino Rota who previously had scored Visconti's "The Leopard and later went on to score "The Godfather". Orson Welles is all so in this film for about film minutes if you don't know who he is well his that morbidly obese character who plays Louis XVIII with some what of a British accent. I would love to have seen this film on the big screen i only hope one day it comes out in some poky art house cinema.