Napoléon

Sacha Guitry is certainly on familiar ground here for in the 1940's he had already given a splendid performance as the wily diplomat Talleyrand in 'Le Diable Boiteux', adapted from his own play and was less than convincing as the older Napoléon in his 'Le Fabuleux Destin du Désirée Clary' in which Jean-Louis Barrault featured as Napoléon the younger. It must be said that both these films, despite being on a far smaller scale, are more dramatically effective than his later big budget, star-studded historical extravaganzas.

In this later film he repeats his role as Talleyrand and again we have not one but two Boneys in the shape of Daniel Gélin and Raymond Péllegrin.

Although cut by a third in the dreadfully 'dubbed' version designed for North American viewers, most of whom neither know nor care a jot about French history, Guitry's attempt to cram the life and loves of Buonaparte into three hours has resulted in a series of vignettes whilst the perpetual fast-forwarding reduces the Egyptian and Russian campaigns to almost minor events and completely ignores his escape from Elba.

Suffice to say it looks simply fabulous with production design by Réne Renoux and cinematography by Pierre Montazel but it remains alas show without substance and pageantry without psychology. Guitry was by nature a man of the theatre and the film's static direction and lack of camera movement do nothing to bring the material to life. He has wisely assigned the battle sequences to another, namely Eugene Lourié.

Guitry adored his actors and this simpatico is very much in evidence here. For this viewer at any rate the always excellent Raymond Péllegrin is one of the finest Napoléons he has seen whilst the glorious Michele Morgan as the hapless Josephine de Beauharnais beautifully captures the innate sensibility and nobility depicted in portraits of her by Prud'hon and Gérard. This director had a definite penchant for actresses and Marie Walewska is played by wife number four, Lana Marconi.

Totally superfluous musical interludes include a flimsy rendition of 'Plaisir d'Amour', not to mention 'Un Chanson des Maréchaux' by the film's composer Jean Francaix with lyrics by Guitry(naturally) and sung on the eve of Waterloo which provides a perfect excuse to utilise the manly baritones of Yves Montand and Armand Mistral. It is probably best to draw a discreet veil over the bizarre cameo of Erich von Stroheim as Beethoven.

Unsurprisingly Guitry's Napoléon is a national hero but to Beethoven he became anything but for when the composer heard that the consul had crowned himself emperor he famously scratched off his dedication to him of the 'Eroica' symphony and declared that Napoléon would become yet another tyrant who would tread upon the rights of man.

i'm sorry but for such a big fan of hist(e)orical accuracy i think, and it is just a honest opinion that you should have made a spell check on your post. Then you would have acknowledged the fact that the word "emporor" written with a capital E does not restore the Emperor's honor not even when compared to Sacha Guitry's terrible attempt...But your little spelling error tells us more about the "type of cat" you are more then it tells us about Guitry's failure to satisfy your taste in historical re- enactments. I'ts not like you had to direct a whole movie...you just made a small comment on it...and look how it turned out...well good chance in finding something better then Abel Gance's silly re-enactment...as if artistic films should do just that...re-enact things as close as possible to your own petty little view...and i see that you are not only an expert in historical movies and how they should be done, but that you are also an expert in type casting, movie business and what not...it's good to see that people like you are still around, so the whole thing doesn't crumble to pieces... keep up the good work of being you, and long live the Emporor...right right?

This poorly made inexcusable film tries to be too sympathetic to Napoleon and is loaded with innumerable historical inaccuracies. Talleyrand doing the narration is absurd to begin with since he continually back stabbed Napoleon at every turn. Whether one loves the Emperor or loathes him, this movie will only bore you to tears. The acting is wooden and monotonous with the characters all indistinguishable from each other. The famous Battle of Waterloo is given all of one minute without even mentioning Napoleon's opposition and the retreat from Moscow isn't even shown at all. Anything worthwhile that Napoleon did in his lifetime is also completely left out. Lastly, Orson Welles as Sir Hudson Lowe (Napoleon's jailer on St. Helena) is the most incredible case of miscasting I've ever seen in any movie. It just shows how far Welles' stock had fallen in Hollywood to be involved in this farce just for a paycheck. Abel Gance's "Napoleon" from 1927 is still the film to see if one is interested in the life of the Emporer. Napoleon was at least an entertaining and animated conqueror/dictator. In this 1955 version starring Daniel Gelin, he is merely a glaring monosyllabic moron.

The poorly dubbed English version is appropriately available on a poor, slightly-out-of-focus and somewhat-drained-of-color Hollywood Classics DVD. Produced on a lavish budget with a galaxy of famous players as long as your arm, this is an egocentric production in which most of the famous stars – buried under loads of make-up – are totally unrecognizable. Robbing them of their voices doesn't help either. Daniel Gélin plays the young Napoleon, but the role is soon taken over by Raymond Pellegrin – who looks nothing like Gélin but bears a remarkable similarity to Charles Boyer's Nappy in Clarence Brown's 1937 Conquest. The movie is directed by Sacha Guitry as an almost endless series of boring tableaux which may have been reasonably effective in the original French production, but look old-fashioned and stagey in the carelessly dubbed DVD (which gives no indication of its length but is most obviously NOT 3 hours and 10 minutes, and I seriously doubt that it is even 105 minutes).

For the ultimate "Napoleon" experience we have to go to 1927 and Abel Gance's masterpiece. Guitry's version is solid - but it crams almost thirty years into one movie. Gance had a longer movie - but it ended in 1797; Waterloo was in 1815, and Guitry's account even went beyond Napoleon's death: it concluded with the glorious return of Napoleon's remains to Paris much later. Nonetheless, even though it moved from scene to scene too quickly and needed more character development, this is a solid historical account worth seeing. BEST OF ALL, both the Gance and Guitry versions give us an alternative interpretation of Napoleon instead of the usual Anglophile hate-filled anti-French propaganda, as seen in "Horation Hornblower" and others.