For my 12th birthday, I was allowed to invite a group of school friends to the award winning film, Waterloo. I had already climbed the Lion Mound and visited La Haye Sainte on a battlefield tour and was captivated by the leading characters played brilliantly by Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer. I still have the 28-page booklet, which candidly reveals the secrets of the filming in the Ukraine and inspired me to study the different approaches to soldiering used by the two protagonists, Napoleon and Wellington.
Both these famous generals bridged the military-political divide. Whereas, Wellington was content to serve his King and Country as Prime Minister, which he was invited to do on two occasions, Napoleon’s megalomania drove his attempt to rule the world. It is for this reason that the Corsican holds a greater fascination to the media, but it is intriguing that despite 10,000 books being written about him, no one before Sir Ridley Scott has produced an epic film biography of the Corsican and that Stanley Kubrick cancelled his attempt after the commercial failure of Waterloo in the 1970s.
In the past decade, there has been a continuous stream of major films about 20th century warfare, including: War Horse, Dunkirk, Hacksaw Ridge, 1917, They Shall Not Grow Old and All Quiet on the Western Front. I wonder whether Ridley Scott’s film will start a new trend for 19th century war films and the Crimean War will come back into focus, given the situation in Ukraine today?
Rupert Wieloch 