Christopher Plummer's suavely witty Wellington unexpectedly steals the attention and the acting honours from Rod Steiger's ranting Napoleon in this enormously expensive epic. The Technicolor photography maximises the immense hour-long battle sequence at the climax. A marvellous production, it won Bafta awards for best art direction and costumes. This £25million Italian-British-Russian film laid a huge egg at the box-office, taking only £1,400,000 in the US, and its failure led a Stanley Kubrick film on the life of Napoleon to be cancelled. Actor Terence Alexander says the KGB monitored non-Russian cast members. To save costs, producer Dino De Laurentiis ordered a cameraman not to load a new reel of film, which then ran out before Steiger finished Napoleon's emotional abdication speech - to Steiger's fury!

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