Donald Clarke: Napoleon still the historic figure film directors can’t get away from

One of the most durable of historical figures is getting another outing. Why do we keep coming back to Napoleon? Have we yet decided if he is hero or villain?

You can see why Ridley Scott might admire that Corsican. Neither the film director nor the military leader have any contemporaneous rivals in the application of will. Scott has completed 12 films – and is currently at work on a Gladiator sequel – since passing the age of 70. Do you really want me to summarise Napoleon’s achievements? He gave the Russians and the Prussians hell. He oversaw a code of laws that survives in amended form to this day. When not massacring the Spanish or beating up the Egyptians, he found time to write romantic novellas and a history of his native Corsica. Imprison him on an island and, in less than a year, he’d hop on boat to Cannes and, without the aid of social media, gather a force to test the resolve of six opposing nations. Okay, Napoleon never made a sci-fi horror to compare with Alien, but did Beethoven dedicate a symphony to Ridley Scott?

Anyway, as you are almost certainly aware, this week the trailer for Scott’s succinctly titled Napoleon landed. Forty-six years after adapting Joseph Conrad’s The Duellists for the his first film, he returns to the Napoleonic Wars with a biopic starring Joaquin Phoenix. Sadly, the trailer repeats the current, infuriating habit of layering a slowed-down rock song – this time Radiohead’s The National Anthem – over the action, but, if you can put this from your mind, you will enjoy a promising collection of noisily staged highlights from an incomparably busy life. There he is shelling Parisian protesters in his breakthrough assignment. Here is Vanessa Kirby as an impressively thorny Empress Josephine. Watch enemies falling through the ice in what I take to be a recreation of Austerlitz. Phoenix looks to be going for a slyer school of arrogant megalomania than is the cinematic norm.

Astonishingly, no figure in history has been portrayed so often in movies. One recent count – certainly surpassed even before the release of Scott’s film – lists 194 appearances. That was about 40 more than Jesus Christ and he’s the actual son of God. Every generation gets a Napoleon. Every generation several Napoleons. We may occasionally get the Napoleon we deserve.

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It is not for this humble column to declare Bonaparte hero or villain (though it is probably a less perilous task than deciding the same about Winston Churchill). It is, however, reasonable to point out that the arguments are still fierce on either side. Shortly after the trailer arrived, David Andress, professor of history at the University of Portsmouth, “took to Twitter” to declare Napoleon “literally one of the worst people in history”. Don’t be fooled. “You think he looks cool because he paid people to make him look cool,” he continued. “He used the entire resources of state and empire to make himself look cool to future generations.”

Given our awareness that he waged war on more or less everywhere that wasn’t France, it is remarkable how rarely the cinema portrays him as any sort of monster

Andrew Roberts, a historian of conservative hue whose 2014 study Napoleon the Great could hardly be more thumping, would almost certainly disagree. The introduction to that book ends with him acknowledging the continuing controversy before noting that “I hope the reader will be in no doubt why I have called [the book] Napoleon the Great.” Beethoven began as a fan, but ended up disillusioned. Both Stephen Maturin and Jack Aubrey in Patrick O’Brian’s naval novels are in no doubt as to his malignity.

‘Superhuman energy’

We have little idea how Scott’s film will turn out, but Professor Andress is not entirely wrong when he intimates that popular culture thinks Napoleon “cool”. Given our awareness that he waged war on more or less everywhere that wasn’t France, it is remarkable how rarely the cinema portrays him as any sort of monster. We should not be surprised that Frenchman Abel Gance, in his legendary 1927 film, represented the general as, to quote David Thomson, “a model of superhuman energy”. Rod Steiger made him a flawed, tormented, spiteful genius in Waterloo (1970). Marlon Brando also allowed a heroic strain into his troubled Napoleon for the not-much-loved Désirée (1954).

[ Glorious warrior or racist tyrant? France battles over Napoleon’s legacy ]

There are delightful comic incarnations. Ian Holm obsessed with his (exaggerated by British propagandists) shortness in Time Bandits: “Alexander the Great… one inch shorter than me!” Too fond of ice cream in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The various screen adaptations of War and Peace have recognised Tolstoy’s deflation of the myth, but, for the most part, the world is still enthralled by the legends Napoleon built around himself.

Much assisted by the painter Jacques-Louis David – his Leni Riefenstahl – Napoleon does, indeed, appear to have been among history’s greatest self-publicists. And we never even got to see the biopic Stanley Kubrick promised for decades.