[img]http://www.bookofjesus.org/images/zzfn02t9qmg47ohkh.jpg[/img]
[B]Director: Sergei Bondarchuk
The Duke of Wellington: Christopher Plummer
Napoleon: Rod Stieger
The armies: 16000 borrowed soviet army troops[/B]
Heres a slightly hammy trailer
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmRDwWiz6kw[/media]
So who here has heard of this? I certainly haven't. Curiosity got the better of me and I decided to get hold of it.
The battle of Waterloo changed the history of Europe in 1815 when Napoleon was finally defeated once and for all by the Duke of Wellington assisted by the Prussian army. The film starts just as Napoleon goes into exile but then skips to the time when he escapes and goes home to France where the army welcome him back for part 2 of European empire building. I don't think I can spoil this film because if you don't know how it ends, then you're a fucking muppet. What I will say is the battle scenes are the biggest I've ever seen put to film. We are talking no CGI in 1970, just 16000 Russian soldiers dressed up as 3 armies scrapping it out in a field. The panoramic shots are impressive and give a huge sense of scale and the performances are to match, Plummer being a jolly good upper class Englishman and Stieger as the working class Corsican leading the French.
The film was a commercial disaster. So what happened here? Why doesn't this sit on the same shelf as Sparticus, Gladiator or Dude, wheres my car? Well theres a few reasons. The film was made at the height of the cold war and most of what you see is Russian manpower financed by Russians and Italians. Columbia and Paramount distributed the picture but this is by no means an American or British production despite the main 2 actors being a Brit and a Yank. The film doesn't have side stories to humanise the story like a love interest or a subplot, this is a straight up account of what happened which some feel is rather clinical.
Heres some stats:
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.
Legend has it that theres a 4 hour version of this tucked away somewhere but nothing so far has surfaced. In the end credits are characters who didn't appear in the film which confirms this. Go check this great film out and watch out for a small cameo of Orson welles as king Louis.
Kisses, Jewdozer.
I remember when i watched the battle when i was young,Good times.
I love this movie. It's fucking amazing. It's probably the closest to what a battle from that era would look like. the scale is a bit off, but it's awesome none the less.
shiiit i remember watching this in 1998
Here's the full movie on Youtube.
[video=youtube;oKmqRqY0RLg]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKmqRqY0RLg[/video]
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