On the basis that watching film adaptations of novels can sometimes be classed as research, I requested last Christmas, and was given, a copy of 1970’s film-depiction of Waterloo, featuring Rod Steiger as the Emperor Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. It also has Orson Welles as Louis XVIII.

I did not, in the end, watch it as “research” for my dissertation, which is probably just as well, largely because of its 2-hour plus run time and not very often having said two uninterrupted hours. We still didn’t manage to watch it all in one go. On the other hand, its very French bias did make a change from the heavily British and Allied focus of Heyer’s An Infamous Army.

Plummer might have made a better Wellington if I hadn’t half-expected the Nazis to turn up and cart him away. Mind you, given the depiction of his relationship with Field Marshal Blucher of the Prussians, Blucher might well have obliged. Also, if the script had been better and the cinematography a bit less artistic with fewer lingering close-ups as he paused between sentences and tried to look down his nose. Steiger, however, did make a wonderfully crazed Napoleon, clearly not at his best to take advantage of Wellington’s military mistakes.

They did seem to skip through preliminary battles of the Waterloo Campaign, though, and seemed to suggest that Ensign Lord Hay was still with them on the Waterloo battlefield. He died at Quatre-Bras. There were various other inaccuracies on the Allies’ side that rather annoyed me too. I can’t really comment on the French depiction, since my research focused on Wellington and the Allies.

Apparently, the armies fiercely fighting were some 17000 Soviet soldiers, including a brigade of cavalry, leading Bondarchuk to be described as in command of the seventh-largest army in the world at the time. The battle-scene reportedly cost a fifth of the film’s $25 million budget. To be fair, the film is called Waterloo. You’d expect most of it to be taken up with the battle.

On the whole, it was quite a fun film. Once I got past the inaccuracies in the bits I knew about.