Two Other Movies About Napoleon
Abel Gance and Greta Garbo
I haven’t yet seen Ridley Scott’s new Napoleon movie. I see the reviews are mixed and I don’t have much cause to think I will like it, but because of my interest in Napoleon in general, it’s a movie I will inevitably see (and likely write about here). In the meantime, here are two other movies about Napoleon: one good, one mediocre-to-bad.
Napoleon vu par Abel Gance (1927)
The first is a movie I have protective feelings for, since it was important to me in my adolescence and remains so: the silent epic Napoleon vu par Abel Gance. I wrote about it at greater length earlier this year, trying to explain why I love it:
In between blurry, chaotic shots of the schoolboys fighting in the snow, Gance repeatedly cuts back to the face of young Napoleon, calmly delivering orders. What are the orders? Doesn’t matter. This is when silent films feel most magical: like opera, the words are of little consequence, only the feeling of them. The moment when young Napoleon realizes he’s winning, allowing himself a tentative smile that later broadens to a grin, always gives me a chill. It’s difficult to explain to myself sometimes why I love this movie, but moments like this are part of it.
Of course, now we’re in a moment where my love for this movie doesn’t need so much explaining. The new Napoleon has revived some interest in the old one, it made the most recent Sight and Sound list (it was absent from previous lists), and the BFI DVD release has made it a lot more accessible than it used to be. It’s been tough to restrain my “I was into this before all of you latecomers” snob impulses, but I’m glad to see it get a wider audience now (and hoping that sometime I’ll be able to see a theatrical screening).
Napoleon vu par Abel Gance was reviewed in 1981 by a writer special to me, whose new-ish trendiness among literary people also makes me feel a bit snobbish and protective: Anita Brookner (“The Loneliest Woman in London”). In her review, she correctly points out its flaws: the risible subtitles, the glycerine tears, the women in 1920’s makeup with Cupid-Bow lipstick. But she also sees in it the things I do.
But if Josephine slightly lets the side down (as the poor woman did, to her cost), the ravishing images more than compensate. There is the cat peering from the mouth of a cannon; there is the hand crushed by the wheel of a gun-carriage; there is a giant Tricolour unfurling; there is a slowly collapsing staircase; there is the unmoving face of Charlotte Corday (beautiful Marguerite Gance) and her hand sheathing the knife in her bodice; there is Marat’s shoulder with a scab on it, and the underside of his dead jaw. And there are, above all, the great set-pieces, like the grotesque and vulnerable faces of the crowd at the National Convention, or the sea like a lake of silver before it tilts into waves that fill the screen from top to bottom; there is the Army of Italy, composed of scores of ragged men, threatening to march into the auditorium. There is Napoleon, gaunt, on his horse in the far distance, looking like Daumier’s Don Quixote. There is Robespierre in the Maison Duplay, his terrors soothed by a young man playing a hurdy-gurdy. There is the giant with the words Mort aux Tyrans painted on his chest; he guards the door to the National Convention and signifies the end of the old order, yet he bows to Camille Desmoulins.
Above all, there is energy, extravagance, ambition, orgiastic pleasure, high drama and the desire for endless victory: not only Napoleon’s destiny but everyone’s most central hope. One sees why this film appealed to de Gaulle, especially when Napoleon outlines to Marat his vision of a federation of European states led by France. At this point, there floated into the vault of the cinema a subliminal feeling that he ought to have been allowed to carry this through.
Conquest (1937)
Conquest, a star vehicle for Greta Garbo and at the time the fourth most expensive movie ever made, has no room at all for extravagance, ambition, or orgiastic pleasure. It dramatizes the story of one of Napoleon’s other loves: the Polish countess Marie Walewska, whom he met while changing horses and then pursued aggressively despite the fact that she was married. Marie was very beautiful and her husband was a minor aristocrat more than 50 years her senior, so Napoleon seems to have thought her fair game. He wasn’t especially subtle about promising favors for then-oppressed Poland in exchange: “Your homeland will be dear to me if you take pity on my poor heart,” he wrote her in a letter1. When she became his mistress, he gave her a generous allowance and was indeed more politically favorable to Poland than his then-ally Russia would have liked. Later, he unceremoniously dropped Marie and divorced Josephine at roughly the same time in order to marry the Austrian princess Marie-Louise for political reasons and because he hoped to found a dynasty of his own. Marie Walewska had a son by Napoleon, whom she took to visit him on Elba and to say goodbye before his final departure to St. Helena. In her memoirs, she claimed to have become Napoleon’s lover only to advance the cause of an independent Poland, and not because of any personal desire.
The story of Napoleon and Marie presented a challenge for the censors of the Hollywood Production Code, since it involves adultery, divorce, and out-of-wedlock children. The fact that the story was taken from history both problematized it and gave it color. “The story deals with adultery not only not condemned but urged upon by Marie by her elderly husband and the Polish statesman. It deals with Napoleon’s divorce of Josephine. It deals with diplomacy in which women’s favors are used as pawns for securing advantage, nothing new but a bit unsavory for the average middle class motion picture audience,” was the assessment of one Production Code bureaucrat. “It is not possible to ‘clean this story up’ under the under the code and have no intimate relationships between Marie and Napoleon or the industry makes itself somewhat a laughingstock by its treatment of historic facts… This story looks dangerous to me.”2
But these fears were addressed by the screenplay: the writers added scenes where Marie’s husband condemns her adultery (and becomes estranged from her), another where her brother also condemns her, and plenty of moments where Garbo expresses regret for having given herself. The script also implies that Napoleon and Marie’s first sexual encounter is a rape; I’m not sure whether this was another censor-pleasing change (Marie isn’t a “bad woman” if she resists him rather than becoming his mistress for the sake of political gains for Poland). In the end, Joseph Breen of the Production Code gave his stamp of approval: “There is little physical contact suggested between the illegitimate lovers and, likewise, a conspicuous absence of bedroom scenes, scenes of illicit fondling, etc. This, in our judgment, is going to add much to the worthwhile flavor of the story.”
Makes it sound great, right?
Conquest is not a good movie and not really worth watching unless you are either a fan of Greta Garbo or interested in Napoleon. I am both of those things, in roughly equal degree. Even though the chemistry between Garbo and Charles Boyer as Napoleon is intentionally nonexistent, watching her onscreen is a pleasure: her face so beautiful it almost seems unreal, her low, accented speaking voice similarly unreal, her movements elegant. She’s a mesmerizing screen presence in almost everything she’s in — it’s a shame that most of her movies were not very good. As a bit of a loner myself, she has always intrigued me: her abrupt and total retirement from movie stardom, her obvious distaste for Hollywood, and her determination to remain alone. “I want to be alone” was her catchphrase and a major part of her celebrity persona, but she appears to have really meant it. She famously declined to marry silent heartthrob John Gilbert and was solitary until the end of her life, living alone in New York, shunning attention, and going by the alias Harriet Brown.
Conquest can never quite work, mostly because its protagonist, Marie, has little to do other than be beautifully passive, suffering first from Napoleon’s aggression and later from his rejection. This was typical for her movies. Irving Thalberg said that her heroines “must never create situations. She must be thrust into them; the drama comes in how she rides them out.” The review of Conquest in the New Yorker didn’t find this appealing: “Beautiful, fragile, and tired, she stands in the first scene among the Cossacks invading her husband’s house; and quite unchanged, fragile, and tired still, she waves her last farewell to Napoleon.”
What kind of man is the Napoleon of Conquest? Not a particularly inspiring one. His movements are stiff, and his conversation is lively but awkward. He seems more like a cranky mid-level bureaucrat than the world’s most powerful man, and it’s hard to see why Marie falls in love with him once she encounters him as a human and not just as Poland’s potential savior (I understand that Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is along these lines). Marie’s pity is aroused by a “poor me” speech where Napoleon laments his loneliness: his beloved wife was adulterous, his ideals are disparaged, his enemies call him a tyrant, and no one understands what it’s like to carry so much responsibility. This includes a fairly transparent bit where the screenwriters try to make him sound like someone who believes in American ideals: he describes a “United States of Europe” where freedom and democracy will reign (it’s true that Napoleon imagined a Europe made up of federated states, but by the time he met Marie he was a thorough autocrat).
Napoleon’s character, in its messiness, has not yet translated well to the screen. Abel Gance’s vision is worshipful, showing him only as a noble visionary, and Scott’s (I understand) is the opposite, showing him as a small and petty man. A good portrayal would need to capture the absurdity and the pettiness, as well as help us understand why so many people thought he was worth following and worth dying for.
This quote is sourced from Napoleon: A Life, by Andrew Roberts, 2014.
My source for info about the movie is Greta Garbo: A Life Apart, by Karen Swenson, 1997.