I recently purchased a DVD of the 1970 film Waterloo, starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington. Orson Wells has a brief cameo as King Louis.
There are a few other British actors that I recognize from contemporary shows like I, Claudius. This is because at any given moment, there are only a dozen British actors involved in film and/or television. They get a decade and then disappear or transform themselves into unrecognizable old people.
Waterloo is of course about the battle, but it takes quite a bit of time for the film to get there. The stage must be set, the players introduced so that the climactic clash has the proper sense of importance and meaning.
Steiger is great. I like him in just about everything, and I’m sort of doing a mini-film festival around him, having also purchased In the Heat of the Night. He is great in that one as well.
As was a conceit back then, there are whispered internal monologues from the actors, where they voice their doubts and of course emote to the camera to add dramatic heft. While Steiger’s Napoleon is all swagger externally, internally he knows he has lost a step. His health is not good, and the odds against him are heavy.
Plummer’s Wellington starts as his polar opposite – relaxed, confident, healthy and calm. It is only as the battle wears on that he begins to show the strain, stung by the deaths of aides and key commanders. The battle is thus portrayed as a psychological ordeal playing out on the battlefield.
It reminds me very much of Gettysburg, a 1993 atrocity based on The Killer Angels, an outstanding historical novel by Michael Shaara. Sharra’s goal was to recreate the immediacy of the battle, setting the reader in the minds of the combatants so make it feel more personal and real. Each chapter switches perspectives from a small group of historical figures, and combined with vivid description, the book fully achieves its goal.
The movie fails utterly, and there are several reasons. Perhaps the biggest problem is the direction is utterly lifeless. The battle scenes are dull, lacking the pop and energy of Glory, a far superior film.
The acting is terrible, with corny lines delivered with corny earnestness. When it came out of video, Civil War nerds would gather and play drinking games using various phrases and mock how bad it was.
The costume and makeup are also horrific. Tom Berenger’s beard is an atrocity. The historical James Longstreet, who he tried to play, had a long beard, but this looks like someone glued a broomstick to his chin. Hideous.
And the soundtrack sucks.
Anyway, Waterloo gives that sense of immediacy, and takes its time to let the story unfold. The battle sequences are full of energy and quite impressive, with thousands of Red Army soldiers marching around in period-appropriate uniforms. I wonder what the guys dressed as Polish lancers thought?
Yes, I should mention that Waterloo was filmed in the Soviet Union. Those were strange times. Anyhow, the director understood that this was not filming a re-enactment event, but about creating drama, and so used different shots and angles, and at one point panned across a massive formation of troops to give a sense of the scope of the battlefield. Gettysburg’s camera work was nowhere near as competent, and may as well have been filmed with a camcorder on a tripod.
When the camera did actually try some sort of dramatic effect, it comes across as belabored and cringe-worthy, like something out of a daytime drama. Sad to say, but the battle sequences in North and South (both series) are far superior in terms of drama and effect. Yes, an 80s TV production did a much better job than a much-anticipated theatrical release. Ted Turner wasted a lot of money on that dog.
All of which is to say Waterloo is a movie that knows what it wants to be and becomes that. It is a “war” movie, but also a psychological drama of men facing the supreme ordeal of their lives.
Chateau Lloyd 
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