Review of Napoleon

Napoleon (1955)
8/10
A solid offering.
27 July 1999
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.
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