"Waterloo film in HD" Topic

We're discussing 1836 – slave ownership wasn't a 2019 issue?

It is an issue largely overlooked in accounts of the Alamo, although, to be fair, it was mentioned even in the first film. Richard Widmark as Bowie…..

Deadhead is absolutely right that the failure of Waterloo: the Movie was its failure to include almost any of the epic episodes that shaped the battle. The best explanation for the omission is that it was a Tolstoy view of history that didn't see any significance in the detail.

Not casting William Shatner as Napoleon, or indeed in any role, was also a mistake.

It's a funny thought that had Richard Widmark been a bigger actor we might have seen a biopic featuring Bowie playing Widmark playing Bowie.

David Bowie would have made a good Delancey actually. Pose, look interesting, get maimed.

Why aren't the Heavy brigade cressed in pink trousers. How else can we tell they're British ?

I like the movie Waterloo and would rate it near the top of my list of historical movies. I agree it could have beeb better if certain omitted events had been include. I can also see h aw adding those scenes could have added an extra 20 minutes to a movie that was probably already pushing the length limits. So what do we cut to add those scenes and still keep the run time down?

Was just reading Wiki on director Peter Jackson. It mentions this film as an early influence on him. Interesting.

Till he was corrupted by CGI.

The moustache on the drum major is very 1970s military look.

I never noticed that before. Put it down to the 'grenadier look.' Today, it would be a full beard.

Pose, look interesting, get maimed.

Lol.

I also think Gunfreak's point about the western-style gunfight sound effects is very true – what were they thinking? Awful. Personally, I just hate the "cram-every -famous-line-from-the-Oxford-Book-of-Quotations"-style of scriptwriting. Poor old Plummer, hardly gets to say a word that isn't some hackneyed (probably apocryphal) famous quotation. Bit of a hospital pass for any actor, that.

Not really. It's just like doing Shakespeare. Full of quotations.

I have spent 24 hours trying to answer Bill N's question above.

I keep coming back to "Good Beans Wellington" or "I made one mistake etc" and have made up about 30 seconds so far. OK stop repeating the same bit with the RHA firing line and the spongeman falling forward left of screen (it appears three times, but you have to show artillery). The DoR's Ball has to be shown as it is just about the only bit that shows characters other than DoW and Boney. That gale, Boney blown off his feet as he says "No, tell them We won the war…." Crazy and taken directly from W&P. But the dialogue is needed.

Watched some of the You Tube version that's rated as 1080p.

Definitely an improvement, the close ups are noticeably sharper.

The ball sections are, comparitively speaking, very long and is very W&P like in the endless waltzing anf lingering shots of young love's smouldering glances. I reckon you could lose- ooh- at least a minute.

Private Tollington, with his flowing locks, going doolally and staggering out of the square shouting "Why..what..etc" that wouldn't be missed.

The piper being cut down by a cuirassier and his pipes deflating comically, that can definitely go. Let's not even discuss it.

And as for that awful campy exchange: "The Army will advance" "In which direction, angelcakes?"- Uxbridge deserved to lose both legs for that. That's another, say, 30 seconds.

I watched a fair bit of the fillum yesterday evening. Steiger is much better than I remembered. What I once saw as self-indulgent posturing now comes across as a fully committed interpretation that exists independent of the clunky dialogue, and makes Christopher Plummer, who I still like very much, look positively lightweight by comparison.

"Good beans"- I'd forgotten that. Made me smile but utterly pointless. Rupert Davies as Maigret was a big TV name in the sixties. His French accent was better than his Scots, but I liked that moment: "The Gordons are down to five cartridges a man….oh aye, they'll stand."

I was also thinking, for all else, when will you see so many cavalry in one place again? – And intriguing that the USSR still had 2000 cavalry knocking about in 1969. Belt and braces?

Something to remember with films is that pretty much without exception they all have three acts. Act 1, Act 2, Act 3, the end of each being marked by a turning point in the story.

Some have a sort of a prelude, like the pre-credits bit of James Bond films, and some have a sort of mini-fourth act, like Ripley in the shuttle at the end of Aliens.

But generally it's three acts. With that in mind I'd suggest that the opening / pre-credit sequence would a be a crawl screen explaining the 1814 abdication, then the credits running over Napoleon escaping from Elba.

Act 1 ends where the original Act 1 ends, with Wellington scribbling on the map. What's then difficult is Acts 2 and 3, which have to cover QB, Ligny, the major events at Waterloo and the final defeat on the ridge followed 1/2 an hour later by the fall of Plancenoit.

That's a lot to squeeze into two Acts and there isn't an obvious break point between 2 and 3.

Acts needn't all be the same length, but they are usually roughly so, otherwise the pace suffers. If you look at movies that have notably had extra stuff added in via Director's Cut, the add-ins often unbalance the movie as a result (so in Aliens, Acts 1 and 2 are too long with the restored stuff, compared to an almost unaltered Act 3).

The three-act structure started to be touted as a concept in the 80s- to some extent following analysis of classic films by McKee, the so-called 'script analysis' guru, and others- and then became a part of producers jargon. Five act structures had been more the norm in classic modern drama and opera ('fat lady sings' etc.) and indeed it persisted in cinema. Think of the structure of the Walter Hill's THE STING. There is of course a distinction to be made between structure and rhythm

I think the problem with 'Waterloo' is there is no act structure. We can identify phases in the narrative but the lack of rhythm makes it appear increasingly incoherent. However, a structure of sorts can be identified: One hour's set up. One hour's battle. Aftermath.

Interestingly, within the battle there is a three part structure, with each 'act' shorter than the last, but this apparent intensification of rhythm is diluted by the number of incidents shoehorned into each stage.

Pre-titles [12 minutes]: Napoleon abdicates

TITLES
and- with one bound he is free!

(0.14) THE FRENCH:

20 mins to establish character: Napoleon Ney; The stakes. Finally, Harry Lime, sorry, Louis XVIII, vacates. Napoleon is back. Wellington and Blucher have separated.

(0.35) THE ALLIES:

CAPTION:'Brussels. Thursday June 15th' The Ball. Wellington presides while N advances. Doomed young love. Wellington humbugged. "We'll stop him here."(0.47)

THE CAMPAIGN:
{Ligny} Rain. Allies Retreat. Wellingon's ridge position. N agonises. Dawn.

(1.00) THE BATTLE [1 HOUR]

SQUARING UP [20 mins] Mud. (1.18)The ball opens: '11.35']

From here on the battle develops in a series of bullet points but we can identify three chapters.

(1.20) FIRST ATTACK [20 mins] CAPTION: "Hougoumont 11.55 am'/Erlon/Scots Greys (6 min sequence) Grouchy. Prussians?! "Attack Haye Sainte!" (1.35) "Where is Grouchy?" Napoleon collapses. (2 mins meditation)

(1.39)SECOND ATTACK [10 mins] "Hard pounding!" Wellington pulls back and Ney charges. Cavalry & squares (8 minute sequence) (0.44) Hay killed(0.47)De Lancey falls.

CRISIS

(1.48)CAPTION:'La Haye Sainte 6am' "The farmhouse has fallen, sir. We can't hold them."

N: "We have won the war!
W: "Give me night or give me Blucher."
N: "Wellington's beaten!"

(1.49) THIRD ATTACK [7 mins]
The Old Guard goes. Blucher arrives.
(1.53) "Now Maitland…" (where'd they come from?)
'CAPTION: Haye Sainte 8pm' (Union Jack, must be good)
"The Prussians are here!"
(1.56) "The Old Guards is broken!"
Unhappy N. Happy W
"The Army will advance…."

ENDGAME: It ain't over till its over [4 min sequence]
Uxbridge. Merde {Blucher}

(2.00) A battle won [7 mins]

(2.07) CREDITS

Elizabeth Longford, in her Wellington bio, thought Waterloo had five acts. It's 40 years since I read it, but IIRC the acts were

1/ Hougoumont
2/ D'Erlon
3/ Cavalry attacks
4/ Prussians
5/ Old Guard attack, and collapse

This is no help at all.

I wonder if this would work:

Pre-titles: escape from Elba
Act 1: Congress of Vienna, flight of Harry Lime, mobilisation, Ligny
Act 2: Waterloo, with the repulse of d'Erlon and the appearance of the Prussians marking the end of the act
Act 3: Cavalry, Plancenoit, Old Guard; aftermath

Well I think this message sequence is proving quite fascinating.

Not sure I had ever thought about "structure" or lack of such in the film. I will now!

I just kept wondering why the individual personality events of the battle itself were missed (exceptions death of Ponsonby, de Lancey hit, Uxbridge and his leg). such as closing some gates, taking an eagle, Union Brigade charging into infantry and not just guns, defending LHS etc.

The answer again is the Tolstoy of W&P approach adopted by old Sergei here. This is a chess-type clash of two superhuman personalities. There are bit part players, the bishops, knights and rooks, but the pawns do not get a look in.

Option two looks neat on paper, as these things often do, but either the episodes in Act One will have to be dealt with in very token fashion or it will be even longer before Act Two and the actual battle gets under way.

I noticed something else while thumbing through 'Waterloo': Wellington point of view is dealt with superficially in comparison to Napoleon. As somebody pointed out, his role does come dangerously close at times to delivering famous epigrams.

For instance, after Erlon's repulse and the British cavalry debacle, we are left with no clear sense of where the battle stands because we cut straight to Grouchy. We are not shown Wellington's response to the defeat an entire enemy Corps or his having to pay a needless surcharge with his heavy cavalry.

The Lancers' counter-attack leaves the mistaken impression that the French are somehow left with the advantage although Grouchy's decision immediately after is the first knell of doom, followed by the first sight of the Prussians. The focus remains with Napoleon, culminating in his collapse and the unexplained massing of his cavalry ("Smoke without fire") which perhaps is meant to have something to do with the decision to attack Haye Sainte, which would be odd.

We then see Wellington having to react to successive events. 'Hard pounding.' The cavalry attack. The death of his young ADC's. The loss of Haye Sainte. In response we see him send guns to Lambert; concentrate his forces in the centre; look increasingly worried.

Attention swings to the Old Guard, and the struggle by Napoleon's and Ney's to keep control of their troops. Then we cut back to Wellington, now with a look of strangely ecstatic pleasure on his face, as he tells Maitland (who?) that 'Now is his time'- a cue for which there has been no preparation- whereupon rank upon rank of immaculate Foot Guards spring to their feet from remarkably untrampled corn to deliver aendlessly withering fire on the front ranks of the less than immaculate Garde, and suddenly the pressure is off, as if this is what Wellington was waiting for all along. Then it's 'The Girl I Left Behind Me,' for some reason, and "Damme, Uxbridge, if I ever saw 30,00 men run a race before….etc. etc."

@42flanker

That's all very true – I think most of us have such deep emotional formative ties to the film that it's nigh on impossible to step back and look at it objectively. Until reading your post above I had never really thought about just what a terrible job the narrative does of describing the actual course of events of the battle.
Imagine somebody with zero knowledge of Waterloo watching the film – their grasp of what happened that day would be quite bizarre. There are so many gaps in the facts which we (often subconsciously) fill in.

<1>There are so many gaps in the facts which we (often subconsciously) fill in

I think that's very true. It's rather like watching the battle out of the corner of your eye.

Perhaps the film's narrative should be seen as an admirable illustration of Wellington's opinion that accounts of a battle had as much value as the account of a ball.

If we were being generous we might conclude that was Bondarchuk's intention.

The film is undeniably fun to watch from time to time, but I won't need to for at least another five years, now. (Thanks to Dynaman8789 for the link.)

I am pleased to have rehabilitated Steiger's performance in my estimation. Bondarchuk's achievement (and Laurentis') was to allow the space for that both in shooting and the edit.

Er, perhaps we should stop knocking the Waterloo film, considering how many Napoleonic themed movies/dramas we've been offered since then. I can only think of War and Peace. Sharpe, Hornblower and one of my favourites, The Duellists. Was there any more? Will there ever be more?

All these comparisons between Waterloo and War and Peace, anyone would think they were both directed by the same man…

There was that French mini-series on Napoleon…kind of like Sharpe, but with less jiggling female bits.

Jiggling bits in HD would nice.

Plenty of them in the charge of the Scots Greys…

I seem to think there were only a couple of instances of jiggling bits in Sharpe – not excessive for 20+ hours of Peninsular War drama?

The Scots in 'Napoleon' just have jiggling beards.

Presumably extras trying to catch Peter Jackson's eye.

Finest moment in Sharpe, possibly in the entire history of televised drama, is a young Liz Hurley in all her glory (well top half anyway). "My compliments Ma'am" was all he could say. Not sure I could have done better after twenty + years of thinking of a better response.