Ian Holm – The Magnificent 60s

At the height of his power after the tremendous critical and commercial success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) you wouldn’t have wagered on Stanley Kubrick being outfoxed by Italian uber-producer Dino De Laurentiis. But the latter’s Waterloo (1970) was the prime reason why MGM shuttered Kubrick’s ambitious project. It’s not the reason it was never eventually made – money was.

At one point, it looked as if the movie would shift over to Columbia, which had funded the director’s previous hit, Dr Strangelove (1964), and thence to United Artists – production scheduled to start in September 1970 – before ending up in the lap of Warner Brothers, which would prove Kubrick’s home for the next few decades.

One of the reasons WB was so keen was that it had greenlit a movie by British director Bryan Forbes called Napoleon and Josephine. This was to follow The Madwoman of Chaillot (1970), a project he had taken over at the last minute after John Huston bailed. But it never went ahead because Forbes instead took over as head of production at British studio EMI. To have considered the project in the first place, despite facing competition from Waterloo, would have meant WB viewed the idea as a financailly sound.

The bigger problem, commercially, was that two events coalesced. By the end of the 1960s, the 70mm roadshow was on its last legs. It still continued in haphazard fashion into the early 1970s, but scarcely with the vigor and elan that had produced such different movies as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Doctor Zhivago (1965) and The Sound of Music (1965) that set fire to the global box office.

As important, studios hit a financial wall at the end of the 1960s as over-investment in all sorts of unlikely roadshow vehicles, often musicals, came back to bite Hollywood. And with Easy Rider (1969) cleaning up, the message to Hollywood was mean and lean.

So a project that could top out at $30 million – even with Jack Nicholson, Audrey Hepburn and David Hemmings involved – and inevitably run over budget, take well over a year to complete and appear when who knew how the movie landscape would have changed, and working with the only director from whom no studio executive in their right mind would dare seize control, this version of Napoleon was put on the back burner, resurrected every time Kubrick had a hit.

*As well as the massive book, there were coveted extras, accessed via this card fixed to the inside front cover of the Taschen publication.*

When MGM pulled out it was deemed “one too many…ultra-high budget commitments for the studio,” one of the hardest hit by financial turmoil. Columbia, it transpired, had only toyed with the idea. Warner Brothers built up the notion of coming to Kubrick’s rescue with Variety headlines such as “Costume Epic Due Anew? WB Hunch,” that appeared in Variety in 1972. It was the kind of movie that you almost expected an operation looking to grab Hollywood attention, say new ventures like Cannon or Orion, to pick up.

While Waterloo (1970) was seen as the main obstacle, coupled with the fact that one of the reasons Abel Gance’s Napoleon had stiffed way back in the silent era was American audience indifference to the French Emperor, it has to be said Hollywood would have noticed that Kubrick faced more competition than just De Laurentiis. Wider awareness of subject matter might have come from an unusual source, since Barbra Streisand was contemplating starring in a new Broadway musical about Napoleon and Josephine,

That there was continued interest in Napoleon was proved with the release of Fielder Cook’s Eagle in a Cage (1972), starring Kenneth Haigh (The Deadly Affair, 1965) and Billie Whitelaw (Leo the Last, 1970) and British acting royalty like John Gielgud (Khartoum, 1966) and Ralph Richardson (The 300 Spartans, 1962). This was limited to Napoleon’s exile, and was funded by a newcomer, Group W, its biggest-ever production gamble, albeit with a budget of only $1.25 million. The Brits proved pretty keen on the subject matter, a television mini-series Napoleon and Love (1974) up next starring Ian Holm (Chariots of Fire, 1981).

Interest never dwindled. There was a French musical in 1985 and a French mini-series at the turn of this century with an all-star cast including Christian Clavier (Asterix and Obelisk: Mission Cleopatra, 2002), Gerard Depardieu (Green Card, 1990) Anouk Aimee (A Man and a Woman, 1966) and Isabella Rossellini (Blue Velvet, 1986).

The larger obstacle had always been the budget which the new Ridley Scott picture has overcome thanks to the deep pockets of Apple.

Just how far the ever-obsessive Kubrick got with his project can be seen from the gigantic tome – Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made – running to 1100 pages, published by Taschen and now a collector’s item, copies changing hands for up to $2,000, containing not just the entire script, but all the details he had already filled in of costumes, locations, budget, and even his own thinking, as revealed in a series of interviews with collaborators. The book is crammed full of photographs and it’s a good a testament to a film that never was as you’re likely to find. I have a copy and can attest to that.

Surprisingly, there’s a happy ending. Apparently, Steven Spielberg is taking up the Kubrick mantle. HBO, not shy of spending gazillions as proven by Game of Thrones, has enlisted the director to make an eight-part mini-series based on the Kubrick screenplay. And although officially in retirement, Jack Nicholson is the first big name signed up.

Old legends never die.

SOURCES: Alison Castle, Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon (Taschen, 2009) ; “Kubrick To Make Napoleon for MGM Next Year, Box Office, July 22, 1968, pE7; “Kubrick’s Napoleon not for MGM May Go Via Columbia,” Variety, January 1, 1969, p5; “Forbes Has Full Reign on Napoleon and Josephine,” Box Office, January 6, 1969, pW3; “Kubrick’s Napoleon to UA,” Variety, January 15, 1969, p21; “Newley-Steisand for Broadway Tuner on Nappy-Josie,” Variety, July 2, 1969, p1; “Group W Biggest Theatrical Feature,” Variety, September 10, 1969, p7; “Gaffney as Kubrick Assisant on Napoleon,” Variety, October 19, 1969, p25; “Costume Epics Due Anew? WB Hunch,” Variety, January 12, 1972, p6; Advert, Napoleon musical,” Variety March 13, 1985, p120; Peter White, “Steven Spielberg Says Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon 7-Part,” Deadline, Feb 21, 2023.

Stunning opening section thrown away by shifting tone and despite excellent performances by the Oscar-nominated Alan Bates and Dirk Bogarde drifts into Kafkaesque virtue-signalling.

But let’s get the title out of the way first. I had assumed a “fixer” was a manipulator, an underworld type of character who could, for a price or future favor, sort out problems or find someone a job or act as an intermediary between politicians or businessmen. Not so. Yakov (Alan Bates) is nothing more than a handyman, who can fix broken windows or railings and turn his hand to anything such as wall-papering or basic accountancy.

In the credit sequence he demonstrates his skills by fashioning with wood, a couple of screws and some steel, a razor, with which to remove the hair and beard that would identify him as a Hassidic Jew. He is, as soon becomes apparent, afflicted by dogs. As he departs his remote cottage in a cart, a vicious dog so disturbs his horse that it bolts, resulting in the loss of a wheel. He continues his travels on horseback, arriving in a small town in time to witness a parade and Cossacks rampaging through the streets.

As it’s set in Czarist Russia, his journey is accompanied by melancholy violin with, for some reason, a disturbing undercurrent of military drum. As the credits end, we cut to the Russian flag and a marching band. He hides in terror as the horsemen drag people along by the ear, slash with sabers, hang others. It’s a pogrom, the type of attack commonly experienced by Jews living in ghettoes.

Up to now, it’s just outstanding. Then it tips into the picaresque. Yakov helps an old drunk Lebedev (Hugh Griffiths) who’s fallen down in the snow in the street. As reward he is offered work wall-papering a room. He has a prick of conscience when he realises that Lebedev is an anti-Semite. Lebedev’s daughter Zinaida (Elizabeth Hartman) seduces him. But, on spotting some blood on a cloth, he refuses to go through with the act.

Luckily, my reading of crime novelist Faye Kellerman has alerted me to the fact that it is an act of faith for Jews not to make love when a woman is menstruating. Luckly, Zinaida isn’t so up on her Bible (Leiticus 15: 19-23 in case you were interested) that she catches on to this revealing fact, for, as has been pointed out earlier, minus the distinctive curl, Yakov doesn’t have the physical characteristics associated in those times with a Jew. In fact, you would say Lebedev would more easily pass for one.

Anyway, Lebedev gives him another job, of counting the loads leaving his brickworks because he suspects he is being swindled. But the foreman, who has been rumbled, and suspects Yakov of being a Jew, calls in the Secret Police, it being a crime for Jews to leave the ghetto.

Now we tip into Kafka. The initial charge against Yakov is that he harbored another Jew during Passover. But then things spiral out of control. He is accused of passing himself off as a Gentile (non-jew), attempted rape of Zinaida and then of ritual murder, killing a small child.

Investigating magistrate Bibikov (Dirk Bogarde) is sympathetic and manages to avoid the rape charge much to the fury of prosecutor Grubeshov (Ian Holm) but once the other charges mount, he is nailed, everyone determined to prove an innocent man guilty.

This is based on a true case and clearly was a case of persecution and Yakov’s transition from worker happy to hide his ethnicity to gain work to a man who rediscovers his religion is a piece of great acting from Alan Bates. But the points are hammered home endlessly and where director John Frankenheimer (The Train, 1964) so deftly dispensed with dialogue in the superb opening sequence, now he more than makes up for it with leaden speeches, and a film that would worked better for being considerably shorter.

It feels like Hollywood is hard at work. After some moments of mild happiness Yakov’s cinematic chore is to invoke sympathy for an entire nation rather than taking on the Holocaust directly. Dalton Trumbo’s (Lonely Are the Brave, 1962) screenplay is filled with brooding lines. But providing Yakov with an interior monologue when he dithers over having sex doesn’t work at all, certainly not next to the more effective use of that technique in John and Mary (1969).

At the outset, Frankenheimer treats violence with discretion. We don’t see the dog being impaled on a saber, just its corpse thrown at Yakov. We witness a rope being wound round a man’s neck, as innocent of any crime as Yakov, but not the actual hanging. So what begins as highly-nuanced turned into a battering ram of a picture and characters forced into lines like “the law will protect you unless you are guilty” and “I am man who although not much is still more than nothing.”

Alan Bates (The Running Man, 1963) certainly deserves his Oscar nomination and Dirk Bogarde (Modesty Blaise, 1966) might feel aggrieved he missed out on a Supporting Actor nomination. But too many of the rest of the cast over-act. It’s an all-star cast only if you’re British. But check it out if you’re a fan of Hugh Griffith (The Counterfeit Traitor, 1962), Elizabeth Hartman (The Group, 1966), David Warner (Perfect Friday, 1970), Ian Holm (in his sophomore movie outing), Carol White (Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, 1969) and Georgia Brown (Lock Up Your Daughters!, 1969).

Frankenheimer at his best when he lets the action play without the overload and there’s one almost Biblical scene, lit only by candlelight, that demonstrates his cinematic virtuosity. But otherwise it’s drowned in the verbal rather than the visual. Trumbo based his screenplay on the Pulitzer Prize winner and bestseller by Bernard Malamud.

Some effective moments, but too long drawn-out to make the impact expected.

Tag: Ian Holm

Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon”: The Greatest Movie Never Made

The Fixer (1968) ***