Conquest

As Napoleon Bonaparte, Charles Boyer acts more than I’ve ever seen him do before; instead of the usual variations on his romantic-ideal theme — sometimes called upon to, largely unconvincingly, stretch as far as to play any continental European a producer had need for — he gives a bold and unrestrained attempt at character study, which I hate to say comes across quite painfully and accidentally hilarious. If anything else in Conquest played as camp, his work would be a terrific success on that level. As everything is quite serious and staid, it stands out as an admirably preposterous hunch-backed, squinty-eyed, mumbly marvel. He reminded me of something, and it took me the whole film to place it, but finally it dawned on me that Boyer’s Napoleon must have been the model, in appearance and affectation, for Danny De Vito’s turn as the Penguin in Batman Returns. What do you think?



That aside, it’s also a bit shocking and disappointing to find that two of cinema’s greatest lovers, those who separately may have induced more swooning than any other of their respective sexes, hardly burn up the screen together. Maybe Napoleon is just too wacky, diverting all attention from a typically good Garbo performance (one would not think this were possible) and not allowing for any real interplay between them. This is the sort of lavish costume drama MGM excelled at, and Clarence Brown in particular knows how to stage such extravagance: on that level, the film does not fall short. Screenplay is weak, however, and as the romance is unabsorbing the film feels overlong and ponderous: again, I feel that for a film like this to work well, it does not matter if everything in the background is spot-on; the romantic melodrama privileges the couple and if the viewer is not all in for that, nothing can save it.