Historical Stuffing

By ROBERT HUGHES

EAGLE IN A CAGE

Directed by FIELDER COOK

Screenplay by MILLARD LAMPELL

Napoleon, like Jesus Christ, has always had vile luck with directors. It is often assumed that Hollywood has a monopoly on witless historical reconstructions. Of course it does not. The latest film to prove it is Eagle in a Cage, an account of the Little Corporal's exile on St. Helena.

This is the one period of Napoleon's life (except, presumably, his conception) that could be filmed on a small budget; the war is over, thus effecting a great economy in props and stunt riders; all that is needed is a smallish garrison of redcoats, a brace of cameo parts (filled, with steely and rather contemptuous panache, by Sir Ralph Richardson and Sir John Gielgud), one or two sexual objects, a Napoleon, some rocks for the escape attempt and a sunset or two to be glowered at from cliff tops. Once these were assembled, Director Fielder Cook's imagination was set free to contemplate the psychology of the trapped Emperor.

The result is schematic tedium. Napoleon (played by English Actor Kenneth Haigh) has nothing to do, and the script leaves him nothing to say or think. The plot, such as it is, consists of four strands: the foiled escape; the efforts of the garrison commander (Richardson) to move his prisoner from a damp villa to an even damper one; a couple of perfunctory sexual bouts by Napoleon with a married woman (Billie Whitelaw) and a 17-year-old groupie; and some dotty politicking (sample: "I want Vienna!") with Lord Sissal, who is making a deal to restore Napoleon to France on condition that he attack Prussia forthwith.

Gielgud with straw hat and cigar plays Sissal as a lickerish hybrid of Winston Churchill and Malcolm Muggeridge. Cackling over the edge of a tub in which the Emperor is playing a nude scene, he tells Napoleon: "Talleyrand once told me you had four women in one night." This indeed is the stuff of history.

One is left with two hours of Napoleon sitting in his villas, suffering cardiac spasms--a mild attack while mounting Billie Whitelaw, a worse one while mounting a horse--and grinding out fatuities like "Power is my art; I love it the way a musician loves his instrument." The routine virtuosity of good professional actors fills the gaps--but only with the kind of narcissism that mocks the story. No eagle, caged or free, could survive this taxidermy.

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