Waterloo (1970 film)

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Waterloo
(Ватерлоо)

British DVD cover
Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk
Produced by Dino De Laurentiis
Written by
  • H. A. L. Craig
  • Sergei Bondarchuk
  • Vittorio Bonicelli
Starring
Music by
Cinematography Armando Nannuzzi
Studio
Distributed by
Release dates
  • 1970 (1970)
Running time 134 / 123 min.
Country Italy
Soviet Union
Language Russian
English
Budget app. 35,000,000 USD

Waterloo (Russian: Ватерлоо) is a 1970 Soviet-Italian film directed by Sergei Bondarchuk and produced by Dino De Laurentiis. It depicts the story of the preliminary events and the Battle of Waterloo, and is famous for its lavish battle scenes.

It stars Rod Steiger (portraying Napoleon Bonaparte) and Christopher Plummer (portraying the Duke of Wellington) with a cameo by Orson Welles (Louis XVIII of France). Other stars include Jack Hawkins as General Picton, Virginia McKenna as the Duchess of Richmond and Dan O'Herlihy as Marshal Ney.

The film includes some 15,000 Soviet foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalrymen as extras—it was said that, during its making, director Sergei Bondarchuk was in command of the seventh largest army in the world.[1] Fifty circus stunt riders were used to perform the dangerous horse falls. These numbers brought an epic quality to the battle scenes.

Plot

The film opens on Château de Fontainebleau in 1814, after the disastrous Russian campaign and the defeat at Leipzig, with Paris besieged by the Austrians. Napoleon Bonaparte (Steiger) is urged by his marshals to abdicate. He initially violently refuses, but upon hearing of the surrender of his last army under Auguste Marmont he realizes there is no hope and agrees.

He is banished to the island of Elba with a personal guard of 1000 men, but manages to escape and returns to France. Ney (O'Herlihy), now serving the monarchy of the restored Bourbon king (Welles), is tasked with recapturing him. The two French armies meet, but Napoleon steps forward and asks "if they want to kill their emperor." Instead they greet him with cries of "Vive l'Empereur!" King Louis flees as Napoleon and Ney return in triumph to Paris. Despite Napoleon's requests for peace, the other European powers immediately declare war.

Napoleon invades Belgium to quickly defeat the Allied forces piecemeal before they can unite. Meanwhile, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (Plummer), the commander of the British forces, attends the Duchess of Richmond's ball. One young officer, Lord Hay, is engaged to her daughter, and the Duchess begs Wellington to keep him away from the battlefield. The ball is interrupted by the Prussian commander von Müffling (John Savident), who announces that Napoleon has crossed the border. Wellington realizes that Napoleon has got between himself and the Prussian forces. Hastily looking at his map, he decides to attempt to halt the French at Waterloo.

The French swiftly defeat the Allied and Prussian armies at Quarte-Bras and Ligny. Field Marshal Blücher (Sergo Zaqariadze), the commander of the Prussian army, goes against the advice of Marshal Gneisenau to retreat and instead moves north to Wavre so as to maintain contact with Wellington. Napoleon, after criticizing Marshal Ney for letting Wellington escape, sends part of his army, under Marshals Grouchy and Gerard, to pursue Blücher and directs the rest of his forces against Wellington.

The night before the battle a storm rages with heavy rain pouring down. Napoleon suffers severe stomach pain, but refuses to call a doctor. Müffling arrives again to inform Wellington that Grouchy's army is pursuing the Prussians, and that Blücher will have an opportunity to link up with Wellington the next day. Dawn finally arrives and Napoleon's condition improves, but his mood sours when told the rain has soaked the battlefield and the French cannon cannot be moved. The battle is delayed in an attempt to let the ground dry.

The battle starts shortly after 11.30 am with cannon fire from the French. Napoleon then sends a diversionary infantry attack against Wellington's right flank—the Chateau of Hougoumont—with the view to weaken the Allied line, but Wellington refuses to commit extra forces and keeps his line firm.

Napoleon then sends his main infantry assault against the allied center. d'Erlon's corps advance up the ridge and break through the British line. Wellington orders General Picton to plug the gap, who successfully halts the French assault, though at the cost of his own life. The French are then repulsed by Ponsonby's cavalry brigade, the renowned Scots Greys. Overconfident they charge the retreating French, and quickly become isolated from the rest of the Allied force. A swift counter-attack by Napoleon's Polish lancers cuts them to pieces, and Ponsonby himself is killed when his horse sinks in the mud and is caught by pursuing lancers.

As the battle proceeds, troops are spotted emerging onto the battlefield from the woods on the east - it is unclear at first whether they are French (Grouchy's force) or Prussians (Blücher's army), though it soon becomes clear they are Prussian forces. Napoleon suffers another bout of stomach pain and withdraws temporarily from the battlefield, leaving Marshal Ney in command. A reorganization of the Allied line is misinterpreted as a retreat by Ney, who orders a massed cavalry charge. The allied units form infantry squares and the attacks are repelled with heavy losses. In the course of the battle Lord Hey is killed as he rallies the British troops.

Napoleon returns and angrily rebukes his marshals for allowing Ney to attack without infantry support. However he sees the battle has worn down the Allied line. The British garrison at the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte falls and Wellington's line wavers. The Imperial Guard is dispatched to smash the remaining force.

As the Imperial Guard advance over the hill, they meet head on with Maitland's Guards Division on the reverse of the slope, lying down unseen in the grass. At Wellington's command they rise up and fire point-blank into the French columns, forcing them back. The repulse of the Imperial guard devastates French morale, and the arrival of the Prussians finishes any chance the French had. Wellington ecstatically orders the entire Allied army to advance to finish them off, and the Imperial Guard forms squares in a last stand. Napoleon declares he will die with his men, but his marshals force him to withdraw. After refusing to surrender, the Imperial guard is blasted with artillery at close range and annihilated.

After the battle Wellington morosely wanders the field among the piles of dead, lamenting, "Next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won". Meanwhile, Napoleon departs in a carriage for Paris, as Ney assures the emperor that his enemies will imprison him yet again.

Production

Columbia Pictures published a 28-page, full-colour pictorial guide when it released Waterloo in 1970. According to the guidebook, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis had difficulty finding financial backers for the massive undertaking until he finally began talks with the Russians in the late 1960s and reached agreement with the Mosfilm organization. Final costs were over £12 million (UK) (equivalent to about US $38.3 million in 1970), making Waterloo, for its time, one of the most expensive movies ever made. Had the movie been filmed in the West, costs might have been as much as three times this. Mosfilm contributed more than £4 million of the costs, nearly 16,000 soldiers of the Soviet Army, a full brigade of Soviet cavalry, and a host of engineers and labourers to prepare the battlefield in the rolling farmland outside Uzhhorod, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union).

To recreate the battlefield authentically, the Russians bulldozed away two hills, laid five miles of roads, transplanted 5,000 trees, sowed fields of rye, barley and wildflowers and reconstructed four historic buildings. To create the mud, more than six miles of underground irrigation piping was specially laid. Most of the battle scenes were filmed using five Panavision cameras simultaneously—from ground level, from 100 foot towers, from a helicopter, and from an overhead railway built right across the location.

Actual filming was accomplished over 28 weeks, which included 16 days of delay (principally due to bad weather). Many of the battle scenes were filmed in the summer of 1969 in often sweltering heat. In addition to the battlefield in Ukraine, filming also took place on location in Caserta, Italy, while interior scenes were filmed on the large De Laurentiis Studios lot in Rome. A massive quantity of period props were built by E. Rancati and hundreds of pairs of footwear were supplied by Pompei.[2]

Months before the cameras started filming, the 16,000 Soviet Army soldiers began training to learn 1815 drill and battle formations, as well as the use of sabres, bayonets and handling cannon. A selected 2,000 additional men were also taught to load and fire muskets. This army lived in a large encampment next to the battlefield. Each day after breakfast, they marched to a large wardrobe building, donned their French, British or Prussian uniforms and fifteen minutes later were in position. The soldiers were commanded by officers who took orders from director Sergei Bondarchuk by walkie-talkie. To assist in the direction of this huge, multi-national undertaking, the Russian director had four interpreters permanently at his side: one each for English, Italian, French and Serbo-Croatian.

Cast

In credits order.

Uncredited roles[3]

Trivia and mistakes

While the film portrayed the events of the "Hundred Days" quite faithfully, including some allusions to and scenes from the Battle of Ligny and of Quatre Bras, there were a few mistakes, presumably made for artistic purposes, and some characters act as ciphers for others. In the opening scene, where the marshals are attempting to persuade Napoleon to abdicate, Marshal Soult is present: in 1814, Soult was commanding the defence of Toulouse against Wellington's Army.

At the Duchess of Richmond's ball (which itself was held in something more like a barn than the magnificent ballroom depicted [4]), there is an entirely fictional romantic sub-plot with Lord Hay and one of the Duchess' daughters.

More importantly, the movie depicts one of the battle's most decisive elements, the arrival of the Prussian army, rather superficially as they arrive to win the battle in short order: distant columns of Prussians are observed by the general staff of both armies, arriving on the battlefield at the very end of the day to change the outcome with a single blow. In reality, Prussians intervened in the battle and engaged the French in increasing strength.

Unlike the Prussians in the movie, arriving at the right flank of the French force, General Bülow's 4th corps attacked at the rear-right of the French lines at the village of Plancenoit. Napoleon first sent his reserve corps (under General Lobau) and then some elements of his Guard to engage and delay these Prussians, while maintaining his front line: these clashes in and around the village of Plancenoit were crucial to the battle. After a couple of hours, another Prussian corps arrived on the battlefield to link with the British army, sealing the fate of the French force.

William Ponsonby, before leading the British cavalry charge, tells Uxbridge that his father had been killed in battle by lancers, not least because he had been riding an inferior horse: in fact his father had been a politician who died of natural causes back in England,[5] and he is simply foretelling his own fate in the battle.

The Duke of Gordon is depicted as leading his Gordon Highlanders into battle, and is described by the Duchess of Richmond as "uncle": in fact, he is a conflate character, representing the contributions of several members of the House of Gordon. The Duke at the time, the founder and colonel of the regiment, was the Duchess of Richmond's father, and he saw no active service overseas during the Napoleonic Wars; his son and the Duchess's brother, the Marquis of Huntly (later the 5th Duke) was a distinguished general, but held no command in the campaign, although anecdotal evidence suggests that he arrived during the aftermath of the battle; the senior representative of the family at the battle was in fact the Duchess's own twenty-three-year-old son, the Earl of March, who would eventually become the 5th Duke's heir in 1836, and who served as a major and an aide de camp to the Duke of Wellington; another branch of the family was represented by another ADC, Colonel Sir Alexander Gordon, aged twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the brother of the Earl of Aberdeen; in reality, both were young men similar in age and duty to Lord Hay. The field commander of the Gordon regiment during the campaign, Lieutenant Colonel, John Cameron of Fassiefern, had been killed at the battle of Quatre Bras on 16 June.[6] The acting commander of the regiment during the battle appears to have been Major Donald MacDonald of Dalchosnie.

Reception

The film was the fifth most popular "reserve ticket" movie at the British box office in 1971.[7] However it failed to recoup its cost. This, in part, led director Stanley Kubrick to abandon a film he was preparing on Napoleon. Post release saw the film gain popularity and received numerous positive reviews for its battle depiction. The film is rumoured to have originally been 4 hours long and shown in the Soviet Union. Several historical characters listed in the credits do not actually appear in the film, they are said to have been in scenes cut before release.[8] In this 'extended version', the chronology of Waterloo is said to have been much more detailed as well as more in depth coverage of the Battle of Ligny. However no extended version has ever been released.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ J G H Corrigan Waterloo (A reviews)
  2. ↑ Waterloo (1970/I) – Company credits
  3. ↑ Internet Movie Database entry
  4. ↑ Foulkes, Nick (2006). Dancing into Battle: A Social History of the Battle of Waterloo. Weidenfeld &Nicholson. p. 138. ISBN 0-297-85078-4. 
  5. ↑ Jupp, P. J. (2004). "William Brabazon Ponsonby (1744–1806)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/22506. 
  6. ↑ Chichester, H. M.; Sweetman, John (reviewer) (2004). "Cameron, John (1771–1815)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4446. 
  7. ↑ Peter Waymark. "Richard Burton top draw in British cinemas." Times [London, England] 30 Dec. 1971: 2. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 11 July 2012.
  8. ↑ Evans, Alun (2000) Brassey's Guide to War Films Potomac Books Inc

External links

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