Books, Arts & Manners: Waterloo Re-enacted

War may be Hell, but, with skilled direction, it is also good cinema. For those whose tastes run to what Byron termed “battle’s magnificently stern array,” but have had to settle lately for costly khaki pap like Tora, Tora, Tora, Dino De Laurentiis’ Waterloo (distributed in the United States by Paramount) will come as a breath of fresh gunpowder. For a dramatic vehicle, it is also a creditable piece of history, giving the viewer a fairly sound grasp of the battle and the characters. But Waterloo is more than the story of Napoleon’s last pitched battle. It is a treatment of the Hundred Days, the little Corsican’s last fling on the stage of Europe, which reached its bloody climax in the rainy Belgian countryside on June 18, 1815.

For practical reasons, the battle was re-enacted in the Ukraine with twenty thousand Russian troops participating under the direction of the Soviet film artist, Sergei Bondarchuk, who won an Academy Award for his recent marathon version of War and Peace. The original battlefield was painstakingly duplicated and the troops were drilled in the nineteenth-century manual of arms. Never has the camera better recorded both the poetry and the horror of formalized, Old World warfare. At times, using slow motion, Bondarchuk captures an almost balletic quality, especially in the memorable charge of the Scots Greys, perhaps the best handling of a cavalry charge ever rendered on the screen.

AB

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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War may be Hell, but, with skilled direction, it is also good cinema. For those whose tastes run to what Byron termed “battle’s magnificently stern array,” but have had to settle lately for costly khaki pap like Tora, Tora, Tora, Dino De Laurentiis’ Waterloo (distributed in the United States by Paramount) will come as a breath of fresh gunpowder. For a dramatic vehicle, it is also a creditable piece of history, giving the viewer a fairly sound grasp of the battle and the characters. But Waterloo is more than the story of Napoleon’s last pitched battle. It is a treatment of the Hundred Days, the little Corsican’s last fling on the stage of Europe, which reached its bloody climax in the rainy Belgian countryside on June 18, 1815.

For practical reasons, the battle was re-enacted in the Ukraine with twenty thousand Russian troops participating under the direction of the Soviet film artist, Sergei Bondarchuk, who won an Academy Award for his recent marathon version of War and Peace. The original battlefield was painstakingly duplicated and the troops were drilled in the nineteenth-century manual of arms. Never has the camera better recorded both the poetry and the horror of formalized, Old World warfare. At times, using slow motion, Bondarchuk captures an almost balletic quality, especially in the memorable charge of the Scots Greys, perhaps the best handling of a cavalry charge ever rendered on the screen.