I've read the other reviews. I agree with them, and I won't bother to repeat what they say. This is a great film. However, I chose to award the film four stars instead of five because of Gance's tendency to fixate and belabor. For example, the snowball fight scene at the beginning made its point long before Gance allowed the scene to end. Even people who don't have short attention spans might justifiably wonder when the movie is going to move on. Gance stops and smells the roses so much that in four hours he gets only up to Napoleon's first major campaign. Other directors could have gotten us up to Moscow and back in four hours (although perhaps they could be criticized for not stopping to smell the roses enough). If you are looking for a film whose plot sweeps you along, this is not it. (Don't get me wrong -- the music, scenery, costumes, camera action, etc. do sweep you along -- but not the plot.) If you are looking for a film that picks and finely crafts one scenario after another, this is it.

British film preservationist and historian Kevin Brownlow's detailed history of Abel Gance's "Napoleon". Covers Brownlow's initial interest the film at an early age, and his 25 year quest to reconstruct it. Offers a detailed history of the production of the film, its many versions as produced by Gance, and the films triumphant return at Radio City in 1981. An essential book in the history of film. Lots of detailed information about Abel Gance available nowhere else.

Remarkable, engrossing epic that was something of a life work for its inspired director Abel Gance. Re-issued after restoration, with much fanfare, in 1981. The story deals with Napleon's youth and early successes, rather than his Empire days. Indeed the making of this movie was an epic seemingly as long and inspired as its subject. Among a torrent of innovations, Gance had cameras mounted on moving objects such as firing cannon; shot a segment in color and another in a '3-D' process similar to those popular in the 1950s (but in 1927!) but decided that he didn't like these effects after all; and pioneered wide-screen film, with three adjacent cameras making contiguous images, in outdoor segments seen in the later parts of the 1981 release. The hell of it is, this film is not about film technique but rather about the story and the actors. Gance himself appears as the revolutionary leader Louis Antoine de Saint-Just; Albert Dieudonné in the title role is possessed by his character, whom he well mimics in appearance; and you won't forget Robespierre, peering at the world and his colleagues through his sinister dark glasses. Although released on black-and-white film, many scenes are tinted (in, naturally, the Tricolor blue-white-and-red), with some of the three-camera wide-screen segments underscoring this point via simultaneous Tricolor tinting.

Though I don't know this for certain, it would not surprise me if this movie showed up on top-10 lists of many serious film buffs. That is, film buffs who have actually seen a few films besides the latest Tom Cruise, and therefore have basis from which to comment. (...). Film buffs long familiar with major films like Intolerance and Battleship Potemkin and The Red Balloon and the Warners 1940s _films noirs_ and Bondarchuk's War and Peace (the largest feature film ever made, by several measures) and La Ronde and 8 ½ and Shadows of [Our] Forgotten Ancestors and Witness for the Prosecution and All Quiet on the Western Front and Olympia and Grand Illusion and the Powell-Pressburger spy dramas and Green for Danger and Mon Oncle and A Man for All Seasons and It Happened One Night, that sort of thing.