Search - Napoleon on DVD

Content Advisory: Mild Violence, Suitable for Children Movie Release: 1927 Format: DVD SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 3 hrs 46 mins Studio: Universal Members Wishing: 5 Genres: Epic, Historical Film, Biopic [feature], Historical Epic

The chef d'ouevre of legendary French filmmaker Abel Gance, the 235-minute Napoleon was supposed to have been the first installment in a multipart film study of the French military hero. Each of the film's set pieces is treated like a movie in itself: the opening pillow fights and snowball battles, staged while Napoleon is still a schoolboy (played by Russian youth Vladimir Roudenko), are choreographed on a scale worthy of D.W. Griffith. The plot proper begins with Napoleon's adult years. From home island of Corsica, Lt. Napoleon (played as an adult by Albert Dieudonné, and old friend of Gance's) decides to side with the Republic during the French Revolution. He quickly proves his mettle in a preliminary skirmish with the British. Offered the office of commander of Paris, Napoleon declines: he does not subscribe to Reign of Terror, nor does he believe in doing battle against Frenchmen. He is thrown in prison, where he meets his wife-to-be Josephine; thanks to a series of governmental upheavals, both are set free. For the next few years, France's bureaucratic bean-counters and pencil-pushers constantly thwart Napoleon's dreams of glory. The film's climax is Napoleon's rallying of the dispirited French troops and his subsequent advance into Italy.
Beyond its patriotic content, Napoléon was largely designed as a showcase for the revolutionary "Polyvision" process. Simply put, Polyvision utilized multiple images for dramatic effect. Sometimes this was accomplished in a fragmentary manner similar to the multiscreen techniques utilized in such 1960s films as The Thomas Crown Affair and The Boston Strangler. Polyvision could also manifest itself into a Cinerama-like "triptych": three screens, side by side, sometimes offering a panorama, sometimes displaying three separate but thematically linked images. Napoleon's spectacular triptych finale was the crowning touch to the remarkable camera pyrotechnics seen throughout the film; Gance hated static scenes, so he mounted his camera on pendulums, horses, gyroscopes, et al., masterfully placing the spectator in the thick of the action. The film also boasts some of the silent era's best color tinting, with special emphasis on the red, white, and blue of the French flag. Except for limited European showings, Napoleon has not been displayed in its original form since its 1927 Paris premiere. At least 19 different versions of the film exist, some horribly mutilated (cut from 17 reels to eight) and scrambled, others haphazardly reedited by Gance himself. Filmmaker/historian Kevin Brownlow's 1968 book The Parade's Gone By renewed public interest in Gance's lost masterpiece, sparking a 15-year campaign to restore Napoleon, spearheaded by Brownlow and American director Francis Ford Coppola. The resultant restoration job is not perfect -- the triptych scenes had to be reduced to postage-stamp size because no existing screen can accommodate them -- but this Napoleon is probably the closest we'll get ever get to the original. The music for the restored version was composed by Francis Ford Coppola's father Carmine Coppola. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Albert Dieudonné - Napoleon Bonaparte
Abel Gance - Saint-Just
Edmond van Daele - Maximilien Robespierre
Gina Manès - Josephine de Beauhamais
Annabella - Violine Fleuri
Antonin Artaud - Jean-Paul Marat
Pierre Batcheff - Gen. Lazare Hoche
Alexandre Koubitzky - Danton

Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927), as restored by Kevin Brownlow and presented by Francis Ford Coppola, was a major laserdisc release in the mid-'80s from Universal, but has not seen the light-of-day on DVD in America. Universal's Australian division, however, released Napoléon as a Region 4 disc (playable only in Australia, New Zealand, and related territories, or on properly set up computers, or all-region players) on the occasion of the movie's 75th anniversary in 2002. It's odd what the passage of time and the advance of technology can do to seemingly impressive work out of the past -- at the time of its theatrical re-release in the late '70s, the work done to bring Gance's movie to something approaching full-length had seemed prodigious, in both its quality and results. The results are still okay, but compared to the full-blown restoration job done on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Gance's movie now seems disappointing in many shots, with too much grain, too many little jumps, too little detail, and perhaps too dark as well.

The print as restored and licensed to Universal pushes the sharpness of digital video to the limit, and is found somewhat lacking in the bargain. The tinted sequences come off rather better than the untinted ones, and -- to be sure -- the movie still constitutes great viewing. Gance's shooting and editing, and the performances they present, are astoundingly powerful, and Carmine Coppola's score has aged extremely well, so that it is easy to get swept up into the movie's action, even 77 years later. Every section of the film has a scene (and sometimes more than one) that grabs the viewer by the throat; it could be something as seemingly unanimated as the shot of Napoléon Bonaparte facing the sea and his lonely quest to keep Corsica French, while a horn plays in the background; or the hero's fight against his rivals as a boy, in the snow; or the rising of the Spanish, Italian, and English-descended Corsicans against the hero; or the hero's flight from Corsica on horseback, to the sea (and into a storm), pursued across the countryside by his rivals; and the intercutting of Napoléon's battle with the storm and the sequences depicting the Reign of Terror's start in France. It's all still some of the finest purely visual storytelling that one is ever likely to see. Gance's use of overlapping shots, montage, and interlocking multiple images was decades ahead of his own time, and much of the movie remains spellbinding despite the now seemingly primitive source materials.

The content is identical to earlier MCA-Universal releases of this title, full-screen (1.33:1) for most of its length but occasionally restoring the original "Polyvision" triptych image (2.55:1), especially in the final section of the movie. This is, of course, the version of Napoléon released by Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope in the USA. There was a slightly longer restoration prepared by another distributor, containing footage from the film found at a still later date by Brownlow, scored by Carl Davis, and released in England. That version of Napoléon has never been released on DVD, and if it ever does become available, might make a fascinating comparison with this edition. The present 226-minute version has been given 19 chapters, which is rather paltry considering the complexity of the movie and its subject. There are no extras of any kind, otherwise, not even a promotional trailer for the re-release. The disc opens to a simple two-layer menu on startup, with the "play" option in the default position. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide