Sadly, I’ve seen this movie more times than I have Barry Lyndon (1975), and this impressive calamity (accidental oxymoron) is what is universally posited as the reason Kubrick never made his Napoleon biopic.
It’s a hell of a logistical achievement, grand scale Abel Gance-like cinema utilising an entire Soviet infantry division; the sheer fact it got made is stupefying. At the same time it’s utterly dreadful, the director wielding his camera with carefree abandon, going from one style to the next like an ADHD child with a Tyco Xmas pressie. And the performances are dire, Rod Steiger’s Napoleon especially. He is constantly bulging his eyeballs, histrionics reaching Nicolas Cage levels. Even more fingernails-down-the-blackboard cringe are his inner monologues, the wee Corsican revealing his every banal thought to the audience.
Yet it was always on TV, strangely on Sunday afternoons. It remains ‘just one of those things’. I’ll probably see it again (I voluntarily watched it the other day), my own guilty pleasure. As Pauline Kael said, ‘You talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies.’
Full horror show here:
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 