Hi David.
The other day I got to watch it again. All I can say that it is 2hrs 7mins of complete and utter rubbish. Apart from the credits at the end. I dont know what the director had in mind or what his political stance was but IMO he missed. But each to his own.
Maybe I'm wrong defending this film as I haven't seen it myself for donkey's years, but I don't remember it being that bad, (maybe memory is better than reality) but as you seem to really have such a downer on it, I wanted to know why. Was it the anti-war mood, the misrepresentation of historical characters or events, or just poor acting?
I recently watched Far from the Madding Crowd (original) on TV and thought Terence Stamp looked really awkward although the film was fine. I also love Richard Lester's two 3 Musketeers films but find the anacronistic humour painful, I think some of the films made in the sixties to eighties suffer from miscast actors who were too Shakesperian lovey (Geilgud, Richardson) or just trendy at the time (Hemmings, York).
Makes me wonder what will we be saying about the Cumberbatchs and Pitts in another thirty years time?
I am an obsessive about the battle of Waterloo. I was relatively young when the Bondarchuck film came out and was blown away by it. It was as acurate as it could probably have been at that time and I did not realise that half the dialogue had just been been taken from attributed quotes unsubtly shoe-horned in (this is something that really grates with me now).
After decades of new research and having read literally dozens of books on the subject there is hardly a scene in the film which I can't criticise or refute, but you know what? I still enjoy watching it and I dip into the DVD regularly, as, together with Bondarchuck's War and Peace, they are still the nearest I can get to seeing a resonable approximation of the size and scope of a full Napoleonic battle.
