Waterloo

With a rousing Carl Davis score, this presentation of 'Waterloo', a film by Karl Grune about the last hurrah of Napoleon, is a fascinating companion to the Abel Gance epic 'Napoleon' for which he also supplied an excellent and wide-ranging musical accompaniment.

'Waterloo' presents a tale of several people involved in the final battle, Napoleon and Wellington, of course, but also the Austrian general Blutcher (who is seen as a ladies' man - his scene with a flirty Countess about halfway through the film is priceless; as are his touching scenes with his plain wife who he imagines to be a young and nubile girl when they get romantic) and some people within his regiment.

There's spies and flappers, misunderstandings, lost documents, intrigue, humour, and battle scenes which use lots of extras to portray what really happened in Napoleon's last rush for power. Napoleon himself is not as you would picture him if you had seen the earlier Gance film; here he is a bit of a bruiser in a cocked hat. There's also some very scary bagpipers amongst the English/Scottish rank and file.

Not simply a film of war, 'Waterloo' is a story of people, of lovers, of lost opportunities. It deserves to be more widely seen and appreciated, especially with this fine new score.

Some thirty years ago, the composer Carl Davis produced a score for the silent film Napoleon, which led to him doing a sequence of silent scores presented with orchestra in London. For his latest, he has gone back to another film concerning Napoleon, the 1929 German film of Waterloo.

I notice in the movie connections for this film the suggestion that the 1971 film Waterloo was a remake. Apart from the historical events of the battle, there is very little similarity between the films. This is a very German view of the battle, centring around Blücher, who barely features in the 1971 film (or in English school history), and the Congress of Vienna.

Blücher is played as a randy old goat with an eye for the ladies, but still very much in love with his wife. He has decided not to attend the congress and tenders his resignation. But Napoleon leaves Elba and his services are needed.

Added to this is a plot involving a Polish countess acting as a spy for Napoleon attempting to seduce Reutlingen, Blücher's adjutant, and intercepting a message from Blücher to Wellington telling him he's on his way to help at Waterloo.

The battle is about the last half hour of a film over two hours long with little attempt to show the progress of the battle. The battle has long started by the time the action moves to the battlefield.

The battle is not depicted with any of the attempt at realism you'd see today, but I imagine trying to have a sword fight in a group of people on horseback must be difficult without injuring each other. In one scene, a group of highlanders march off and one manages to knock the hat off the soldier in front with his bayonet.

Incidentally, the highlanders' kilts seem rather short - above the knee - compared to kilts one sees nowadays. I don't know if this is historically accurate.

Quite an interesting movie, though I saw it without the benefit of a musical score, making it all too easy to riff. My husband is a big Napoleon fan, and was continually exclaiming that the extremely pro-German slant of the film was completely contrary to the actual history. But he did admit that it hit a lot of historical plot points correctly, only in a rearranged order, or with some compression of time, which is not unusual in a movie. The Battle of Ligny in particular is not often portrayed on film. One problem with the movie is the question of time; it's almost impossible to know how much time is elapsing between events. We go from the Congress of Vienna to Napoleon on Elba, to Napoleon returning to France, to a panicky call- up of allied forces, to scenes of Napoleon advancing through France (entirely on foot, it appears). How long did all this take? A week? Three months? We're never told. I suppose that the original audience must have learned this history in school, and it wasn't thought necessary to spell out the details, just as a modern American film assumes that the audience has some knowledge of American geography, and doesn't find it necessary to explicitly state the distance between, say, Washington and New York. It's just assumed that the audience will roughly know where they are on the map.

Naturally, the real hero of the story is the Prussian commander, Blucher. Napoleon is a menacing, though intermittent, presence in the first half hour, and then disappears entirely for the next hour. Wellington has even less screen time until we get to the actual battle of Waterloo, and despite his nickname of "The Iron Duke", we see him on the verge of cracking under the pressure until a message from Blucher FINALLY makes it to him, and steels him to hold out until rescue comes. The scenes of the Prussians creeping through the woods towards the battlefield remind me of "Siegfried" - the Germans really did love those shots of tall trees with shafts of hazy light slanting down; it's only proper that this image should be evoked again to portray another German hero.