THE LOST CASE OF NAPOLEON

...What are we about in this country, after all, if so many of our audiences and reviewers can fail to notice—or feel too embarrassed to raise—Gance's violations of democratic sentiments...

...most seem pleased to throw slush balls at some weakling's temple or themselves at a bully's feet...

...Gance graphically demonstrates how, come the 216 Revolution, liberty slip-slid into dizzy debauchery, equality into the war of all against all, and fraternity into the herd's betrayal of the rare, higher individual...

...that technical skill, in politics as in art, is our most precious virtue...

...a convincing strongman who, like Alexander Nevsky, will have new incarnations in Hollywood...

...It is rather the wit or quiet courage that redeem tragic vulnerabilities that are so difficult to convey in film: think of how much harder Charlie Chaplin had to work to subvert characters the screen would otherwise amplify, to set up a moment of compassion...

...the film-maker, more than the dictator, has proved to be equivocal about the moral foundations of the civil society that actually issued from Napoleonic order...

...So we think• this certificate of fitness is bestowed by the only character in the piece who might have felt at home in the Third Republic...

...Napoleon—the real one—despised the Terror because he endorsed and meant to extend the proprietary rights of citizenship, even to the Jew who, like any rational man, would presumably know what to do with them...

...Finally, he leads a three-screened march into Italy at the head of an army made invincible by his inspiration...

...I suspect it is the nice way Gance seems to bring this off—the plausibility of his hero's "charisma"—that has started our film buffs raving about his technical ability...

...To the strains of Carmine Coppola's now martial, now cloying score, our Corsican in Paris emerges from the indignities of "Revolutionary" incarceration to his first military posting and never misses a step...

...But these effects can hardly explain his film's popularity when cinerama and technicolor already seem anachronisms...

...In fact, it is Gance's vision—not his imagemaking per se—that riveted most of the Boston audience with whom I saw the film several weeks ago...

...These people were cheering on the Holy Ghost, not—or not only—some old director's aesthetic imagination that, particularly in his case, should not be divorced from a corresponding political ideal...

...in the glow of blue tint, he plots vindication and is comforted in his lovely loneliness only by a pet eagle whom Gance will routinely dispatch to the grown-up Bonaparte's shoulder during similar contretemps...

...True, there is much to approve in Gance's tinting and climatic triple-screen sequence...

...SO THE STRENGTH of his Napoleon's comportment is not just an instrument of destiny but the unifying force of Gance's film...

...The critic Leon Moussinac then called it "a Bonaparte for apprentice fascists...

...Such is the fraternal unity confirmed by mobilization: the Revolution—the French Revolution—bursting its fetters into Empire...

...With just a close-up, Leni Riefenstahl made Rudolf Hess's grinding jaw as indelible as Napoleon's stares, Hess, who had no more strength than Ryan O'Neal...

...Still, I am sorry we did not give Gance less credit on that night, and do ourselves more...

...But, on second thought, how much cinematic skill has Gance had to bring to bear to portray this kind of intensity...

...It should in all events now be more disturbing to Mr...

...We may assume instead that Gance needed no more than competence as a film-maker to produce such a primitive moral vision...

...This Napoleon accomplishes, inevitably, by exacting the militarist's discipline and faith...

...Their cheers, it turns out, were the last Gance heard (by telephone) before dying, an ending he might have thought to invent...

...Rather, we are impressed by Napoleon's taming of the ocean, and are made to expect that he will also tame the raging eyes of the assembly for the sake of a more cherished fate: France...

...At every turn Gance's Napoleon gains, if not by good luck (as when some buffoon swallowed the document ordering his execution), then by the force of magnetic bearing...

...McCabe...

...After returning him to it, Gance does not disappoint such expectations...

...Now liberty can be made splendid by the galvanizing excitements of blood and fire, the unleashing of spirit following upon our alienation of will to the leader who embodies the General Will...

...Rather than to dabble in legal matters, Gance wants his Napoleon to force us free from what seem to him manifestations of our dark and dumb instincts to which the Revolution necessarily, but not exclusively, has given occasion...

...In 1937, moreover, Gance would remake J'accuse, a bitterly antiwar film that, in the face of the gathering threat posed by Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini, 215 implied the folkish defeatism that would soon envelop French politicians and military leaders...

...The born leader tries to take them all on but at last suffers in defiant, dignified silence...

...By contrast, Gance's Napoleon seems to agree with Robespierre and Saint-Just (played with panache by Gance himself) that the masses must be sheep or swine...

...So much for origins...

...But we seem to be no less a bunch of suckers for fascist fantasy, an important conceit of which is, precisely, that society is best viewed as a technocracy of complementary parts that can be made to work more powerfully by leaders who know how to perform...

...Our hero relaxes, all opponents conspire...

...So we may justly infer that Gance's art shared, finally, not in the prestige of the Resistance but in Vichy's triumphs of will...

...Had Danton's ghost learned a lesson lost on Daladier and Blum...

...D. H. Lawrence called the latter surrendering to the "must" emanating from "men in whom you recognize the Holy Ghost...

...And what an occasion...

...just as the leaders of the Girondins are pushed about by the Jacobin waves of riot that engulf the Convention and into which, in his only brilliant counterpoint, Gance spliced corresponding scenes of Napoleon at sea...

...The seas grow stormy and, like Medusa on the raft, our hero is tossed and tested...

...This French director's silent film is literally engrossing, demanding four and a-half hours from our sympathetic nerves and lower backs...

...and they were obviously the more grateful to be doing so in a huge hall with thousands of others...

...But unlike other curios of film literature, Napoleon's vitality and vividness urge a militantly authoritarian ideal of politics, which is not a small fault in a film released in 1927...

...the equal chance to die glamorously, as Gance's soldiers regularly do, whispering the name of their commander who has conjured more authentic fraternity out of the passion of Frenchmen for each others' scent...

...The young de Gaulle, whose good opinion of the film is now widely cited, was at that time not a symbol of liberty but of tank-building...

...Correspondingly, Gance has his Napoleon transform equality into the shared risk of armed struggle against the enemies of heroism...

...Right off we meet our hero shrewdly commanding some other young military cadets in a wild, relentless snowball fight...

...Our hero's true mission, therefore, was to capture the prestige of the Revolution and turn it to saving more nearly human virtues...

...Back at the dormitory, they ignore the day's trials and openly resent Napoleon for his enigmatic superiority...

...Never has Gance implied, however, that Napoleon had been touched by the egalitarian Jacobin ideals that have brought the Convention to turmoil...

...When Gance does attempt something more ambitious than creating tableaus of stiff heroism— some of which derived directly from the paintings of David and Gericault: Marat in the tub, Napoleon on his white steed or posed like a trestle—he fails, and fails more completely to create some necessary evidence of heroic hubris...

...So it was not Gance's technical ability—say, his good editing and novel camera mounts—that made Napoleon work...

...Returning after adolescence to his mother and native Corsica (both tinted amber), the passionately yet inexplicably Francophile Napoleon attempts to foil the machinations of the island's oligarchs who are trying to cut a deal with the English while France endures the political convulsions of Thermidor...

...our hero glares, all cower and swear fealty...

...So there is not much plot to this epic history...

...Gance himself couldn't care less for Danton's actual claims against the ancien regime, for the third estate's lawyers and merchants, and seems taken instead with the perfected version of the old aristocracy preferred by Charles Maurras, the chauvinist leader of Action Francaise, which was important enough to have been condemned by the Pope while Napoleon was being made...

...our hero willingly takes the tyrants' ghostly benediction as he sets out for Italy...

...Touring the country now, playing with full orchestra to a well-rehearsed chorus of critics, is Abel Gance's film Napoleon: in the words of the Boston Globe's Bruce McCabe, "a symphony of visionary cinematic technique, a montage of moods, colors and tones, orchestrated so as to present a vital, vivid and engrossing historical dramatization...

...Defeated but not daunted, Napoleon barely escapes his hunters and casts off for his spiritual homeland, the tricolor his sail, the eagle perched on his mast...

...So mechanistic a view of heroism may be a serious handicap when trying to do justice to Napoleon's life, or to dramatize any historical event for that matter...

...Gance's Napoleon is unforgettable...

...In fact, Gance's protagonist is a means to celebrate the wedding of eminence to absolute authority...

...Napoleon's sentimental love for Josephine is, in Gance's hands, puerile: a perverse, stupid weakness that seems irrelevant to his career...

...But Gance symbolizes Napoleon's ostensible lust for power by having our hero embrace an earth-globe on which he finds Josephine's lips (somewhere over Austria, I think), a scene so long and false one wishes that Chaplin could break in with his own version of the dictator and the globe...

...And as if to discredit the very pertinence of parliamentary disagreement and tolerance to the making of great history, Gance has Danton's ghost bless our hero in turn...

...I suppose we are no more inclined to be cavalier about simple freedoms than were the French whom Gance tried to con...

...217...

...The reception so many educated people have given to Gance's Napoleon suggests, I fear, that it is harder to be thrilled by the gradual emergence of many individuals from scientific and literary culture...

...Though full of himself, Napoleon did not—at least not yet—think dictatorship a political end in itself, and was more given to the scientific details of the old materialism than to the romance of power...

...He then rises like a song to the challenge of the Toulon siege and the greater one posed by Josephine's erotic imagination...

...Is the film's fascination with winning personality, sexy power, Manichaean melodrama, and predatory violence at the heart of the matter, at least inasmuch as we casually absorb such cultural signals day after day, on television— on children's television—and in such popular recent films as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Thief, Flash Gordon, and what not...

...Though short, the boys are nasty and brutish...

...CONSIDER THE OPENING SCENES of Gance's ROW rediscovered Napoleon, contrived to provide us his dim—and crucial—view of ordinary moral sentiments...