MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’20s through the ’80s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week. Here is a bonus review of Abel Gance’s restored Napoleon.
The marching orders were quite clear. I was to spend most of last Sunday, the second day of a four-day run at Oakland’s Paramount Theater, viewing Abel Gance’s much ballyhooed silent film Napoléon. And, in this case, “most of Sunday” was no journalistic exaggeration.
Gance’s 1927 epic has been beefed-up by Kevin Brownlow, whose lifelong mission, after befriending the director back in the ’50s, has been to track down every surviving piece of film Gance shot in the waning days of the silents and weave it into a cohesive tapestry, following the director’s master plan as closely as possible. That means the quality of the image varies throughout, something that matters less as the eye adjusts to the picture’s ebb and flow.
Napoléon now has a staggering running-time of five hours and 40 minutes. A previous four-hour version saw a limited U.S. release some 30 years ago, but the saga, as it now exists in digital form, has never been seen in this country. Sponsored by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, whose entire 2012 budget has apparently been devoured by the undertaking, Napoléon is to be shown in four acts, ranging in length from two hours for the opening sequence to a finale of 50 minutes. Between-act audience breaks range from 20 minutes to a whopping one hour and 45 minutes for dinner. Like any military unit in battle, this crowd, too, marches on its stomach.
Much of the picture details the rising young soldier Napoléon Bonaparte (an iron-jawed Albert Dieudonné) surviving the bloody days of the French Revolution, saved, at one point, from his date with the guillotine by a clerk who literally ate certain documents that would have condemned the unlucky.
By the film’s end, after hard months of little food and less pay, Napoléon is on the verge of leading the French army in the conquest of Italy. The audience, too, emerges from the experience something like Napoléon’s rough-hewn troops: exhausted, hungry and thinner in the wallet (ticket prices ranged from $40 to $120) but richer in spirit for the experience.
Every bit as worthy of the accolades certain to be heaped upon this film was the stunning work of the 50 members of the Oakland East Bay Symphony who performed, live, the soundtrack written specifically for the film by Carl Davis. Under the baton of the composer, the orchestra never missed a cue of the brilliant score written in a modern version of the Romantic style of Ludwig Van Beethoven. French anthem “Le Marseillaise” is a recurring thread of a magnum opus that also uses some of Beethoven’s third and seventh symphonies, as well as Mozart’s 25th.
Incredibly, Gance once envisioned this project as something even larger. At its completion, it was to have included six films that followed Napoléon’s rise to and eventual fall from power: from cradle to grave. The surviving work begins with the man who would become Emperor as a young boy (luminously played by Vladimir Roudenko) in a military academy. Even then, Napoléon displayed a rare talent for war-time tactical maneuvers during a large-scale snowball fight where his opponents were inserting rocks into their snowballs. He also stood apart from the crowd as the only kid in school who brought with him his pet eagle. The image of the majestic bird returns to the work time and time again to symbolize Napoléon’s indomitable spirit.
The technical advances employed here are nothing short of magical. Certain scenes have been re-tinted, blue, red or yellow as originally planned. Others are shot with the central image contained in a circle that fades radially outward. Beginning with the snowball fight, the director uses quick cuts and a hand-held camera to startling effect, then ghosts images of the eagle over the young Napoléon’s face. For a later scene at the school depicting a pillow fight, Gance splits the screen into four, then eight and finally 16 images, something not seen in American cinema until Woodstock in 1970. At times (Napoléon framed on a hillside as the sun sets or on the beach as waves crash about him), you get the feeling you are watching paintings by great masters miraculously brought to life.
The thrilling climax is enough to bring this loyal (and exhausted) audience to its feet. Shortly after marrying Josephine De Beauharnais (Gina De Manès), Napoléon, on his way to lead his army into Italy, stops by the now empty chamber where the Revolution began so many years ago and is visited by the ghosts of that assembly, offering advice on what to do next.
For the film’s final half-hour, curtains on either side of the standard sized screen of its day (in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1) are dramatically parted to reveal two similar screens. The remaining material, shot simultaneously on three cameras is skillfully melded together to present a sweeping portrait of Napoléon’s troops moving about on the cliffs and hills of the Italian countryside. From my vantage point in the fourth row, you had to move your head from side-to-side, like watching a titanic tennis match, to take it all in. It was as mesmerizing as any top-shelf, mind-altering drug.
When an officer on horseback rides in front of the troops, from screen one all the way to screen three, it summons up a thundering round of applause. Even the subtitled material has become gigantic. The re-appearance of Napoléon’s eagle is now sprawled across all three screens. The finale pumped new life into the nervous system of the hardy troops who almost filled this glorious three thousand-seat temple. Now re-invigorated, they could begin their trudge into the rain-soaked tunnels outside the theater leading to BART, the Bay Area’s rapid transit system, with images to last a lifetime dancing in their feverish brains.
