History as Farce - [look behind you!]

A few years ago, I spent a good while pondering the dreadful reviews of the 2002 French TV mini-series Napoleon, and decided that I should give it a miss. Eventually, a very cheap new copy turned up on eBay and - of course - I bought it. Since then I have managed to find lots of other things to do, so have avoided having to pluck up the courage to watch it. Last couple of days I thought it was probably time to give it a go, as the Christmas visitors have gone home and the New Year visitors have not yet arrived, so I have watched the first 2 instalments. My oh my.

The Ill-Tempered Clavier?

First thing I was dreading was the rumour I heard that the dialogue is badly overdubbed into English - you know the sort of thing - the young heroine's lips move rapidly and vehemently for 2 minutes, and the voice of an elderly American actress is heard to say "No way!". I had spent some little time trying to get a French-language version with English subtitles, but in fact it was a false rumour - the actors do speak English lines (so presumably there are different versions), though it is clear that on occasions they do not necessarily understand what they are saying. That's fine - you can get the hang of that. Oh yes - and my DVD, unless you do something about it, has Danish subtitles, which is probably why I got it cheap. OK - suppress the subtitles. Relax. Enjoy.

Christian Clavier - who certainly has commendable charisma - plays Napoleon as a pantomime character [oh yes he does!]. He is also, to put it bluntly, a very short, middle aged man with a comedic appearance - and no amount of his staring at the horizon changes that. The make-up applied to make him into Young Napoleon is a hoot, in fact all romantic scenes (and there are a great many) are a bit of a hoot, since his ladies are all, to a man(?), maybe a foot taller than he is. which makes staring into each other's eyes hazardous.

As far as the military stuff goes, we obviously have to cut them a fair amount of slack - a great deal of money was spent, and they really tried very hard, so it would not be reasonable to carp on about detail errors in uniforms or about the impossibility of doing a convincing full-scale reproduction of Austerlitz in a film (though, come to think of it, Bondarchuk did a good job of exactly that, but he had advantages of cheap manpower). It is attractive to watch - it is, after all, a fairy tale. There is a point where NB says "I have an army of 150,000 men with which I can conquer Europe!", and shortly (sorry - I mean quite soon) afterwards we see his army in action, and we manage to avoid thinking "so where are the other 149,875?".

I'm actually enjoying it a lot, though it has required a little adjustment to achieve this. It is soap opera, and not very high grade soap, at that. Empire-dale Farm, maybe? The Imperial family sitting in a semi-circle, taking turns to speak, is in the best traditions of high school drama groups the world over. The small Boy Scout camp which houses the army of invasion at Boulogne raises only a slight smirk once you have entered into the spirit of the thing. The history is a little odd, maybe - astonishing omissions and some surprising amounts of time given to what I would have dismissed as trivia, which just goes to show what a good thing it is for everybody that I don't work in television. It is pretty clear that the director (Yves Simoneau) has taken some major liberties with Max Gallo's novels (on which the films are based), and I leave it to someone who has read them to offer an opinion about the liberties that Mr Gallo had already taken with history-as-we-know-it. Not to worry - we have a gripping story, we have some colourful characters, we have a context which is close to my heart, and it is beautifully filmed. Pass the chocolates and get me another brandy and I am a happy bunny.

Nah - something jars.

It is very like the feeling I got watching the old Sherlock Holmes movies - I used to wonder why Dr Watson never told Holmes what a patronising, appallingly boring oaf he was - what a total lack of interpersonal skills he was cursed with, what a tragic shortage he had of compassion, or humility, or any other redeeming qualities - and hit him very hard with his umbrella. Or a large haddock would have done the trick. I would have stood and cheered - and no doubt would have been banned from the cinema.

Yes - it's the Alimentary Watson Effect. Napoleon utters his great plan for Austerlitz - "we will retreat a little, and when they follow us down the hill, we will charge back and kick the sheet out of them" (or something like that), and I swear the assembled General Staff all go "ooooooh!". Every line he speaks comes straight out of Napoleon's Quotations [the Concise Edition], and is delivered with the same, sneering, wide eyed expression of crazed over-confidence. I suspect that he will get his come-uppens in later instalments - history suggests that there may be a little of that. In the meantime, as well as the choccies and the armagnac, I intend to keep a large haddock handy.

Then I can relax and enjoy it fully.

"Kolberg" (1945) - contd

Yes - they're still out there, and still singing

Well, I watched it – twice, in fact. Interesting. The film is obviously very dated, but it is well made and the story is underpinned by a good number of events and people which are recorded historical fact. I had not realised, for example, that celebrities of the calibre of Gneisenau and Von Schill were present at the defence of Kolberg.

The conflict between the old mayor and the old (and incompetent) fortress commander is well handled – there’s a lot of humour in their arguments. I had a slight personal difficulty empathising completely with the plucky mayor, since he looks like the fat groundsman at our local bowling club, a man with whom I have had a deadly feud for some months, but that is not entirely relevant to this post.

Gneisenau is scary – spends much of his time staring wide-eyed into space and shouting. Apart from the shouting, in general, the propaganda elements of the film were no more extreme than you find in its contemporary US and British equivalents. Since I have caused offence in this area before, I emphasise with some haste that I am not at all a fan of Nazi Germany, but many of the film’s comments on war and expressions of patriotism are humanist rather than nationalist, and would translate well to other countries, other wars, other times. The townspeople of Kolberg appear to have had an instinct for standing in geometrical formations, and a tendency to hang around in the town square and sing Wagnerian songs, or else chant complicated unison messages to the commandant (in the style of “A Life of Brian”), any of which would have frightened away a would-be assailant.

General Loison, who is something of a hero of mine from his (later) service with VI Corps in the Peninsula, is the commander of the besieging force, and he is a very bad man indeed. He continues the bombardment after a ceasefire has been decreed, for one thing.

At a trivial, nerdy level, I am a little disappointed that the uniforms were not better researched, and that the batteries of very small cannon come into action with the barrels at high elevation, like WW1 howitzers – still, there was a war on. I was also delighted to learn that Kolberg was in old Prussian Pommerania, and that Von Schill (who has a disappointingly squeaky voice for a hero) sets sail in the end for Stralsund (along the coast in Swedish Pommerania), where, sadly, he was killed in 1809 (out of scope for the film, but hinted at), after which point he and his head had separate and extremely gruesome histories.

Overall, I recommend the film. The introduction contains a lot of interesting stuff, and is very heavily anti-Nazi, but political cant in the main feature is otherwise pretty sparse. The appeal to the German nation to fight for their homeland is mostly fundamental stuff about pride in their history and heritage, protection of their honour and their families. The Party does not feature – apart from picking up the tab for the movie, of course. The treatment of brave little Maria, the farmer’s daughter, who sails away to Konigsberg to take a letter to the King (requesting replacement of the old goat of a commander) is very dated and very patronising, and potentially will cause more offence than any subliminal plugs for the National Socialists.

At one point, Gneisenau declares to the king that “the storm bursts”, which is, I guess, a German play on words referring to the Volksturm – the German home guard. The introductory feature shows Goebbels screaming this exact phrase in 1943 or so. I had assumed that Goebbels was quoting Gneisenau, though there is also the more intriguing possibility that in some way Gneisenau was quoting Goebbels. I wonder how that could have happened?

"Kolberg" (1945)

Last night I watched a bit of a DVD I've obtained from the US - "Kolberg", dating from 1945, about the Napoleonic Wars in Germany. I am astounded that I have never heard of this film before. It was a pet project of Goebbels - intended to fire up the German people late in WW2 so they would rush to join the Volksturm. Decidedly strange in places - some of the dialogue is lifted from Goebbels' own speeches - Gneisenau is portrayed as a rather unhinged zealot, who constantly berates the stammering (and very short) King of Prussia about the need to mobilise the citizens to defend the Reich. The main plot surrounds the brave defence of Kolberg against the French by the Prussian people's army - to be honest, I haven't got very far into the main film yet, and I'm not even sure which campaign is depicted.

Thus far, I have mostly watched the introductory feature, describing the circumstances in which it was made - all sorts of sub-plots about Goebbels objecting to individual performances etc. At a time when Berlin and the other chief cities were being bombed into ruin and the German regular army was very short of men and everything else, he was granted vast numbers of soldiers, many hundreds of horses and anything else he needed to make a propaganda film. No expense spared. The initial version depicted what the director considered realistic battle scenes - Goebbels apparently was very upset, accused the director of presenting warfare in an insufficiently glorious light, and they had to cut a huge amount of the film. Of course, the war ended before they ever got to show it to anyone. The version I have is (I think) restored to the director's original.

I'll watch it properly at the weekend - I think it is going to be of academic interest rather than true entertainment, but I'll certainly give it a go. Being a geeky person, I note that we seem to have Prussians in shakos fighting French in bicorns - hence my uncertainty about the period depicted - but it's a fantastically ambitious production - full colour, the works - and the restoration looks pretty good.