A look a Stanley Kubrick's greatest movie that never was

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10 April 2012

Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made

Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius. Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. I could give it to you in the original Greek, from Euripides's Medea, but my typewriter's not up to it. And I'm not sure my desk is up to the task of supporting the enormous Taschen tome that contains the corpus - or even corpse - of Kubrick's work in the late Sixties towards a film on Napoleon that went ultimately unmade. The box-office failure of Dino de Laurentiis's 1970 epic, Waterloo, made that almost inevitable. But what a fascinating insight into the mind of Kubrick this provides, as, fresh from the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he plunged deeper and deeper into the abyss of Napoleonic studies. Ten separate books or sections, corresponding to the film-maker's original files, include the headings - picture file, production, location scouting, correspondence and, of course, script.

Alison Castle, who edited The Stanley Kubrick Archives in 2008, has worked with great sensitivity and with Kubrick's widow, Christiane, as well as with brilliant designers to produce an affordable version of a book originally published in 2009. That limited edition of Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made was more art object than publication and was correspondingly priced at £900. To purchasers of the 2011 imperial doorstop, the full picture file of 17,000 location and reference images originally mounted on IBM slides is available via the Taschen website.

But don't buy The Greatest Movie Never Made for the images online, unless you are a picture researcher. All the best ones are reproduced in the book anyway. Look at the film script to see how Kubrick avoids the battle of Austerlitz, conscious that Abel Gance had recreated it for all time in 1960. Note that Kubrick concentrates throughout the script on Napoleon the individual, the lover, the man of destiny, and pays little attention to the military manoeuvres that were necessary to acquire and indeed lose an empire.

Read Jean Tulard's ancillary essay on Napoleon in Film, preferably in the original French at the back: Napoléon au Cinéma. No French historian knows more about Napoleon and no Frenchman knows more about film. Tulard's "hits" at the Anglo-Saxon nature of Kubrick's Napoleon are exquisite. Read Audrey Hepburn's polite letter turning down the role of Josephine. Enjoy the fact that Kubrick favoured a younger Sir Ian Holm for the part of Napoleon. And, if one has to mourn that this grand and possibly grandiose film was never made, at least Kubrick went on to make A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. So the gods did not destroy him.

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