Sergei Bondarchuk ought to be commended for his really rather sterling effort at re-creating some of the one hundred days of Napoleon's campaign following his escape from exile on Elba in 1815. Rod Steiger is superbly cast and imperious as the maniacal but genius French Emperor who very nearly conquered the mainland continent of Europe, despite the comprehensive alliance lined up against him - and led, at the denouement, but his nemesis the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer). Some considerable effort has gone into designing and delivering this whole spectacle of a film - from the grand palatial settings, the costumes, intricate uniforms - and the battle scenes are as authentic as I've seen since that other Napoleonic epic "Austerlitz" (1960). Steiger portrays the Emperor in a characterful and personal fashion; he is full of the megalomaniac but also the portrayal indicates a little more of what made the great man tick (or not). Having read somewhat more about Wellington (I'm a Brit), I was somewhat disappointed by the slightly smug - almost foppish - portrayal of the "Grand Old" Duke by Plummer. He looked the part, but somehow his efforts were always outshone onscreen - by the fleeting appearances of Jack Hawkins, the glamorous Virginia McKenna - even by a squealing piglet. That said, though - this is a film about a battle and the action scenes are superb. They look and sound genuine engendering no end of sympathy for the soldiers who served as little more than cannon/bullet/bayonet fodder as they marched around (and fell) in the mud. The narrative is quite tight; we don't get distracted by too many romantic interludes or other daft diversions, and once it gets up steam it is an effective depiction of a pretty gruesome conflagration that history (for the winners, at any rate) has successfully sanitised. Bit long, we could do with less of the preamble, but once it gets going it presents a convincing effort from Steiger and is well worth watching as an example of large scale epic cinema before the computer took over the role of the extras, the sets, the story....
