The Eagle Lands on April 1

The standard of Napoleon Bonaparte's Grande Armée was a staff, atop which sat a bronze eagle. In Abel Gance's 1927 silent film, Napoleon, we see the emperor as a youth with his very own pet eagle. The eagle represented courage, its wings spread wide symbolized a protector. These were traits many associated with Napoleon in his early career, before he became something of a tyrant. Beethoven, for example, was a big fan of Napoleon as a general, but despised him later (even crossing out a dedication to Napoleon on a sheet of music that still exists). Nonetheless, the eagle was a symbol of Napoleonic virtues in his younger days, and Gance's five-and-a-half hour epic tackles the early days of an extraordinary life.

Technically, this eagle landed in the U.S. on March 24, but I will be flying from Dallas to see it on April 1, at the last of only four showings at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Words can not express my excitement; this has been a dream of mine since the late 90's when I read about the last time Napoleon played in America. The year was 1981, six thousand people crammed into New York's Radio City Music Hall, and by all accounts it was “the cinema event of a lifetime”.

Those unfamiliar with the film may wonder, “What's so special about it?” If you happen to be in that camp, you may think I'm crazy to fly to another city just to see a movie. Hey, Dallas is nothing. People have flown in from London, Paris, Prague, Amsterdam, New York City, Chicago, Miami, etc. Apparently one of my favorite filmmakers in the last two decades, Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants, etc.) saw it last Saturday and Sunday! So if I'm crazy, at least I'm in good company.

Why, exactly, are these four screenings so incredibly rare and special? I'll save the details for my upcoming review, but lets just say Napoleon is an enormous feat to put on. In fact, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival is paying $720,000 to present these four screenings alone. Plus, I last saw the movie about a decade ago on VHS; it was a shorter version with a different score and played at the wrong framerate.

So why not get the thing on Blu-ray or DVD instead? Well, because that VHS version is still the only version available in America. It's a legal issue. Francis Ford Coppola owns the American rights to Napoleon, and his father, Carmine, composed a score for the film. In the thirty years since then, film historian Kevin Brownlow has discovered more footage, better versions of existing footage, and so forth. He has created two improved restorations since that time, and he wants the world to see them. Unfortunately, Coppola has been a menace at every turn. He wants his cut of the film with his father's score (particularly now that his father has passed on) to be the definitive version.

In my full review I will delve into all the other reasons I'm so thrilled about seeing this epic film on Sunday. To prepare, I have watched two of Abel Gance's earlier films: J'Accuse (1919) and La Roue (1923). I had seen the latter previously, but had never caught the former until now. Both films are visually impressive; seldom have I seen so much camera movement and rapid cutting in a picture from 1919, and La Roue improves upon that. There are two sequences in particular, one involving a train crash and the other a speeding train, in La Roue that make me wonder why Sergei Eisenstein gets all the credit for coming up with the montage. His Odessa Steps sequence in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) is legendary, but Gance was doing similar work at an earlier date.

J'Accuse, with it's extreme melodrama and not an ounce of subtlety, doesn't hold up as well today as La Roue, unfortunately. There is a clear pacifist message, the first in cinema according to Brownlow, hurtling toward the viewer at every turn. It's worth seeing, but Gance was clearly still developing his talents. When it's good, it's very good, and memorable sequences include Gance's actual World War I footage of the Battle of Saint-Mihiel and especially the climax, where the dead soldiers of France rise up to accuse their wives, friends, family, etc. of not valuing their sacrifice. Gance used real soldiers on leave for this scene, and when they returned to the front lines, eighty percent of them perished.

La Roue, the story of an engineer/inventor (Séverin-Mars, also one of the leads in J'Accuse) who rescues an orphaned girl from a train crash, raises her as his own daughter, and tragically falls in love with her somewhere along the way, is a better picture than J'Accuse. It's not entirely free of over-the-top melodrama, to be sure, but compared to J'Accuse it seems there was a sedative added to the wine on set. If memory serves, Napoleon is yet another improvement in that area.

There are some interesting characters and genuinely striking images in La Roue. One image I can't get out of my head is the engineer's little house with a picket fence sitting right by the railroad tracks. When trains pass in exterior shots they seem to be about six feet from the house, and in interior shots they appear always lumbering by through the windows. It's a long film at four-and-a-half hours, but well worth the effort and great preparation for the five-and-a-half hours (with three intermissions including a dinner break) that await me on Sunday.