Albert Dieudonné sails into history as Napoleon.
A HUNDRED YEARS ago, Abel Gance was the darling of French cinema. The writer-director’s recent epic tragedies J’accuse (1919) and La Roue (1923) had wowed audiences with eye-popping visual innovation, emotional gut-punches and buttock-testing runtimes. But nothing could prepare them, or him, for what was coming. Gance knew his next film would put even greater demands on moviegoers’ eyes, guts and buttocks; what he couldn’t know was that it would nearly kill him and virtually ruin his career. Now recognised as a masterpiece, the film’s fortunes over its lifetime have been as eventful as its subject’s during his. If you thought the story of Napoleon was incredible, you should hear the story of Napoleon.
Gance’s vision was ambitious, to say the least: the life of the Corsican boy who became Emperor Of The French was to be told over six films, made in six months, with a budget of 20 million francs. Unsurprisingly, each of these targets would be spectacularly missed.