The Napoleonic wars take on a comic twist with an "I'm so amusing!" attitude that makes it not quite so funny. It's history meets a combination of Mel Brooks, Monty Pyton and Benny Hill with a bit of the 40's style of the Gainsborough films thrown in. Based on stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ("Sherlock Holmes"), this is obviously influenced by the success of the Oscar Winning "Tom Jones", and ends up there with later historical spoofs, "Joseph Andrews" and "Yellowbeard", which were complete disasters.The legendary Eli Wallach is commanding as Napoleon, but his character becomes a joke from the get go with unfunny jokes about his height and made to look like a buffoon. That worked with Mel Brooks' assail on Hitler but here, it just isn't funny. Peter McEnerey plays the title character, a pompous colonel, tongue too far in cheek to be funny. Only Walkach and Claudia Cardinale as a Spanish countess are worthy of praise. The film is handsome to look at, but has a muffled sound recording that sounds like very bad dubbing.

Leonard Maltin has been overly harsh with his BOMB ratings quite a few times, but unfortunately he's not too far off the mark on this one. "The Adventures Of Gerard" comes from the "Casino Royale" (1967) school of comedy - the more money the producers spend, the funnier the film is supposed to be. It's really quite an imposing, big-scale production with lots of extras, horses, explosions, etc. But there are no laughs in it. The puzzlingly bad script is based on an Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) story - I'm assuming a lot of it got botched in translation (4 different people working on the same script is usually not a good sign). Eli Wallach must be the most miscast Napoleon ever, and even the absolute goddess Claudia Cardinale cannot help this disaster much. * out of 4.

I don't think this movie is much to get excited about either but I don't agree that the "easily entertained" are stupid or that they should be "ignored" because of some perception of same, valid or no. I also think that when being dictatorial rather than critical which is the proper tone for a review, one should know the difference in meaning between "fitfully" and "fittingly." When it comes to stupidity, let he who is without etc.... I have seen more than one film which I thought was "stupid" but rarely do I think that people who disagree with my opinion are "stupid" simply because they like something I don't. I am also uncomfortable with the notion that their right to be entertained is predicated on their personal taste.

I was pleasantly surprised by this one: Leonard Maltin rates it a BOMB but I found it great fun, if uneven. Skolimowski's first English-language film was actually shot in Cinecitta' and, in fact, features many Italians in the cast (all of whom struggle with the literary - and very English - nature of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original!).There's still plenty of amusing detail to savor - the subject matter of the Napoleonic Wars is treated as farce most of the time and, in fact, there's quite a bit of slapstick involved (to which Skolimowski's technique is happy to oblige via numerous camera tricks, pretty much the sole link here to his early Polish films) - and, accordingly, all the performances are broadly delineated: Peter McEnery is a pompous yet likable ne'er-do-well hero; Eli Wallach is a buffoonish (and gay) Napoleon; while Jack Hawkins has a whale of a time (which, alas, happened very seldom in the films he made following the tragic loss of his voice) as the flustered leader of a bandit rabble who have adopted novel means of torture and execution, and are even dressed in Klan-type garb! Apart from asides to the audience, McEnery also engages in a constantly interrupted duel with British officer Mark Burns - with whom he also spars for the affections of beautiful and fiery Spanish countess Claudia Cardinale. John Neville is the Duke of Wellington in his last film for almost 20 years (when he achieved some latter-day notoriety, in another tongue-in-cheek fantasia no less, with the title role of Terry Gilliam's THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN [1988]). Riz Ortolani contributes a suitably jaunty, yet frequently rousing, score.Unfortunately, some of the film's visual impact was inevitably lost in the pan-and-scan version I watched (taped off Cable TV); originally shot in Panavision, I wouldn't mind owning this in its proper Aspect Ratio on DVD...