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andymack28
Reviews
Waterloo (1970)
"Promised to love you for evermore..."
Fire up a couple of after dinner Monte Cristo's and Mike Hodges will probably tell you about the time 'Waterloo' producer Dino de Laurentiis took him to a quality noshery and tapped him with: "Mike, Mike
I want you to make Flash Gordon 2..." Fortunately for Dino's piggy bank and Mike's stellar reputation, project spending never got beyond the restaurant tab: de Laurentiis already had a reputation for stuffing vast amounts of investor lolly into plump cinematic turkeys.
Sure, Dino has a gluttonous mind's eye - Spielberg's entire 'Private Ryan' budget probably wouldn't have covered Dino's hat bill for 'Waterloo' but I've always been a great fan of the unfettered big idea. Even if it's flawed it's worth doing if it's done with passion. People get so overbearingly gaffe-happy, picking apart particulars of military dress, manoeuvre and minutiae. So what if 'Proppy' the props man armed Wellington's redcoats with bolt-action rifles - perhaps old Hooky was banking on a Prussian air strike to fish him out of the stew? What draws me back to this film time and time again are those rootedly European, shamelessly post-war cultural stereotypes that mark it for the time it was made and not the time it represents: the English dry, distracted and surreally calm; the French rash, ambivalent and spectacularly self-destructive; the Prussians preceded in every fleeting appearance by the same sinister crash of bass-heavy minor chords used to mark the approach of anyone faintly Germanic in films and Pathé news reels from the early 'Forties on. Wellington breezes, Napoleon flounces and Blucher and his faithful automatons horse around looking for opportunities to get concertedly medieval on anything remotely French-shaped.
While 'Waterloo' in this respect is predominantly caricature, its cinematography does occasionally touch the divine. Aerial shots of infantry squares and massed cavalry remind you that these set pieces were cast, crafted and choreographed: no computerised frothing mounts or Apple Mac grenadiers here. The infamous charge of the Scots Greys is given the full Peckinpah treatment: the beautiful, brutal grace of men and horses at quarter-speed rushing back into the murderous, undisciplined bawl of several hundred plume-hatted adrenaline junkies. The revealing illumination of the defenders of Hougoumont as the day's light fades is a similarly memorable vignette.
Be patient with poorly synchronised voice dubbing, turn a sympathetic blind eye to the anachronisms and factual potholes and appreciate that many of the leads look like squad players for Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band because it is 1970 after all and hair was having a difficult decade
'Waterloo' is worth it.
Thank you Dino.