Okay, hopefully it gets a little less effort-intensive from now on!
Dale rolls an eleven, making her way to
Waterloo, one of the first imports I ever got from Imprint in Australia.
Then, the next night, Centipede rolls a 20, making his way out of the Korean section and down to the next row to land on
The Girl from Rio, one of many crowdfunded silence in this part of the board. The "rule", inasmuch as you can call them that considering how willing I am to make them up as I go along, is that a 20 gets one a bonus movie, usually something already seen, but I've decided that to keep things fair and random, those will involve stepping through a boxed set, in this case the fancy Luc Besson one put out by Sony last fall, and since the silent was short, I watched
The Last Battle the same night.
Given that the difference at the end of the last round came down to Dale having one more movie than Centipede, this might even things up!
Waterloo
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Seen 13 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Imprint Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or
buy the disc at Amazon
Many epics end on a historic military battle; of those, many are clearly reverse-engineered to have a story that climaxes in or during that battle. And then there are the likes of
Waterloo, which don't so much construct a story that will build to that finale so much as their makers figure out where you have to start so that the battle of Waterloo is the final 45 minutes of a movie long enough to be considered epic-length.
That, then, would be a couple years earlier, when Napoleon (Rod Steiger) is initially exiled to Elba after the French army was pushed all the way back to the suburbs of Paris, the nations of Europe having united to contain him. As we all know, it is not long before he has escaped, and while Louis XVIII (Orson Welles) sends Bonaparte's longtime lieutenant Marshal Ney (Dan O'Herlihy) to capture him, Ney soon rejoins the former Emperor as have many of the soldiers. Bonaparte then looks to pick up where he left off, with Europe once again having the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer) lead the forces to counter him, with the armies eventually converging on Waterloo for a fateful battle.
I suspect that there have been an order of magnitude more books and movies made about Napoleon Bonaparte than Arthur Wellesley - the latter is not singular enough that you hear people described as having a "Wellington complex" - but this is a film about a battle, and a battle requires two people facing off, so we spend a fair time with Wellington. Christopher Plummer is, of course, thoroughly capable in the role, but that's the thing; Wellington is capable and professional and not terribly dramatic compared to his opponent, so Plummer has less to do; his scenes are basically waiting to be sent into battle against this foe, so the movie busies itself a bit with the people around him, notably a nice enough soldier who met a girl at a party they were both attending, more or less marking him as the way one will recognize the human cost of this carnage when he dies.
Waterloo is often very dry getting to its title battle, and at times the cast doesn't actually seem to be performing their characters so much as standing in costume while famous words are read in voice-over.
Steiger, by contrast, at least gets to dive into playing this antihero and growl in rage at anyone who stands in his way. It's not really a biography of Napoleon beyond the lead-up to Waterloo, so aside from a few comments about not being able to see his son, there's not much that's personal. Steiger does at least give Bonaparte a sort of forceful charisma, which doesn't particularly contradict how he seems to be doing this campaign to spite the world and show Europe that it had no business resisting him as opposed to trying to achieve some sort of tactical or political victory. Maybe it was, historically, about more than revenge, but that's what animates Steiger's Napoleon and gives the film what emotional stakes it has.
It's striking just how static and dull the shots of the movie stars posing and reciting are when intercut with the massive movements of the Red Army who have been called upon the give the film a cast of thousands, but the scale is nevertheless astounding: Whenever the camera pulls back and up to reveal the armies forming up, shooting at each other's formations, and falling apart, one's jaw drops, and I cannot imagine what it must be like on the big screen. There's so much going on at such a scale that it's hard to conceive of how director Sergei Bondarchuk managed to actually shoot all this without the post-production tools available decades later.
It's not a particularly great movie, and even in the finale when it excels,
Waterloo often gives the impression of just a lot going on rather than a sense of what's happening in the battle. But, boy, if one of our local movie theaters gets their hands on a 70mm print, I'll put down money for a ticket. The film does one thing very well and everything else just well enough to justify the time and expense to get there.
The Girl from Rio '27)
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)
Seen 23 February 2026 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, crowdfunded Blu-ray)
Give a movie a hundred years to age, and the preservation and ability to restore the film will be all over the place: The opening of
The Girl from Rio is in two-strip technicolor, and while it's seen some wear, it's enough to make one's eyes go wide at how the filmmakers have clearly done their best to make it so vibrant that the images will persist in one's memory through the film. Other scenes appear to come from a print so damaged and degraded as to be a pasty white mess covering half the frame, obliterating the facial expressions one might be trying to read. It's maybe an unfortunate reflection of the movie itself - you see what the filmmakers can do even though it's often not sharp.
The girl in question is Lola Rojas (Carmel Myers), a dancer in one of Rio de Janeiro's most popular nightclubs. Her regular partner Raul (Edouard Raquello) is clearly enamored of her, but so is Antonio Santos (Richard Tucker), one of the most prominent men in the city with his fingers in every business, legitimate and otherwise, who takes her home every night. Recently arrived in Brazil is Paul Sinclair (Walter Pidgeon), a young Brit representing a coffee concern, who initially talks to Lola to prove she doesn't make a fool of all men; after all, he's got the lovely Helen (Mildred Harris) waiting for him at home. And while he inevitably falls for Lola, she is surprised to find herself intrigued by his resistance.
It's not a terribly substantial movie, running just a bit over an hour and having a plot generic enough that there are likely several similar movies with a different "exotic" city pasted into the title and without one necessarily cribbing from the other, and I wouldn't even be surprised if the two player films with the same name had the same plot but no direct inspiration (they don't, for what it's worth). It's a very basic template, with what stands out being how amusingly oblivious Paul is to how Helen is clearly moving on, and how Lola's landlady is a busybody who will obviously rat them out to Santos. It's a simple template and the movie doesn't stray from it.
Maybe the filmmakers intended to, at some point, because there seem to be vestiges of interesting details left: When Santos strong-arms Paul's supplier into not selling him coffee beans, he goes to "the independents", and it feels like there's some tension there (though, perhaps, it's less unique to this particular story than the sort of dealing that 1920s audiences more familiar with agricultural business would recognize easily). One initially might think that's what Santos means when he tells Lola that Paul has made enemies without his help, but it turns out he mostly means Raul, who is not only attracted to Lola but relies on her as a performance partner. It's a bit frustrating, because one can see the shape of a story here, but Paul especially doesn't really do anything; the filmmakers apparently don't want the audience to think ill of him for cheating on Helen getting involved in other conflicts and so are content for there to be attraction with Lola but for things to otherwise happen around them. For a short movie, it can feel dragged out.
Still, Carmel Myers and Walter Pidgeon are good-looking young leads with some actual chemistry. It being 1926, things aren't going to get too steamy and the film is built to not necessarily rely on sweet words, but the pair look drawn to each other and at ease, bristling meaningfully but not theatricality when folks say that they should maybe see less of each other and looking pained when they may separate for their own good. Richard Tucker (who, amusingly, would also appear in an unrelated film titled "The Girl from Rio" 13 years later) was in the midst of transitioning into silver-temple roles, and really nails the big shot who is handsome and charismatic enough to attract Lola in the first place but small and jealous enough to be a monster.
Drop the opening color sequence, and there's really not much to this bland but capable movie, although that does make it kind of a perfect example of this popular template.
Le dernier combat (The Last Battle)
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 11 December 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (
Prime link), or
buy the disc at Amazon
Headcanon: Luc Besson's
The Last Battle and E.L. Katz's
Azrael take place in the same post-apocalyptic world, though obviously on different continents and at different times. Not that I think one necessarily inspired the other, because it's not exactly hard to to think "what if a genre movie had no words" independently, and if you're making your first feature on what is likely close to a shoestring budget (apparently expanding a short, "L'avant dernier", with much of the same cast and crew), I bet that not having to worry about dialogue frees up takes to use on action.
It opens on a man (co-writer Pierre Jolivet) constructing an ultralight airplane in an otherwise empty office building, which will allow him to fly above the marauders led by a sadistic "Captain" (Fritz Wepper) operating nearby - although, when it crashes, he's taken care of by an eccentric doctor (Jean Bouise) who has a young woman (Petra Müller) hidden on his property. The man assists the doctor, hoping to get close, but a man outside the gates (Jean Reno) decides that he's going to come for her more directly.
Besson was Besson right from the start, apparently: Jean Reno is in the cast, Eric Serra does the music, the script is a genre boiled down to its essence but with style and whimsy, and, boy, is he not doing well by the women in his cast. It's not like the men come off much better, since this is the sort of post-fall-of-civilization future where one grades the various loners on who is just a little bit less selfish than the others, but it's not exactly creative in the midst of a movie where the filmmaker is clearly trying to get notices for having some style so he'll get tapped to make bigger things. This is pretty much a demo reel with a basic story - some action, some jokes that don't stop it, a handle on the tone, and a finale of sorts.
And, sure, it demonstrates that well enough. Besson and cinematographer Carlo Varini get some great shots, taking decent advantage of their black-and-white stock to keep their desert and urban settings interesting to look at but not too pretty or self-consciously dour; the team also stages action well, even at this early stage; there's characterization in the way folks fight. Jean Reno's "brute" attacks with a determined mania while Pierre Jolivet's protagonist is trying to figure things out in a way that reflects that we're introduced to him as a builder. I don't know that anybody watching this in 1983 would look at Reno and figure on him eventually becoming an international star, but it's not exactly surprising looking at it 40 years later.
Like a lot of low-budget early works
Le dernier combat is more interesting than great, worth watching for seeing the seeds of what would emerge as Besson earned bigger budgets and moved onto the international stage. It doesn't have the playful, understated energy of his better works; he has to stretch thin material more than he can chase odd impulses. It's good that Sony throws this into the boxed set, but, no, it's probably not worth using 4K replication capacity so it matches the rest.
That pulls the number of films watched even; who's doing better?
Dale Evans: 33¾ stars
Centipede: 34 stars
Centipede pulls ahead by a nose!
