Viewing Notes - Sharpe's Waterloo
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As far as I remember, this is the first time I've ever watched this episode. Though I have no idea how many snippets I've seen on the clips channel or elsewhere. At this point I've read about a third of the book, and I aim to hit scenes in the book before the show. Yup, managed that. Finished the book before I finished the film.
1:55 A very fine distant shot of the farm with some of its best views...
3:45 Part of his reason for going - and he even says this to Lucille - is because he's never actually fought Napoleon himself.
4:20 His rifle is on the wall over the fire in the kitchen.
4:55 I can't remember who it was complained about Charles Woods' dialogue being very pompous, but I tend to agree.
Je me tais - yo detuve a mi lengua
Nous sommes tous mortales.
All their servants have left to go to the war for Napoleon.
The background music for this scene is - I think - "Will this moment last forever" as at the end of Revenge. Love Farewell.
5:45 Looks like Hagman there, getting on a cart. Yup. And Harris.
God, I'm crying already. A montage of scenes of various people all travelling along to the sound of Over the Hills and Far Away. Hagman and Harris in the cart, Harper riding a horse and leading ?three? others, looking very smart, a fine bright white neckcloth, Sharpe himself riding alone (although Lucille said she would go with him). He's got the old uniform on and he's smiling.
7:00 Slender Billy playing cricket with the nobs including Johnny Rossendale. Bitch face is there too. Wellington and Rebecque standing watching. Really - "Sharpe bowls fiendish" says Wellington? When did he do that?
Honestly, the expo is a bit clumsy here. What's called, I think, actress and bishop dialogue, just one person telling the other things that the audience need to know, all very straightforward and clunky. So now we and Rossendale know that Sharpe was a half-pay captain and is now a Colonel on Slender Billy's staff.
11:00 And now we've shifted to Sharpe scouting around to watch for the French marching.
12:25 And the first action is like ten men a side. From youtube comments, this episode is apparently the most embarrassingly inadequate in terms of portraying the fighting, which is one reason for doing the book first, so I understand what is actually supposed to be happening.
16:10 Bitchface is ordering Rossendale to kill Sharpe in the battle and then she can become Lady Rossendale. He doesn't exactly look thrilled at the prospect and his mother certainly won't be, apparently.
16:50 So here we have Harper selling a horse to Lt Doggett, and Hagman and Harris sitting around, when Sharpe rides up and goes into the ?inn? This might be the weird scene where for some reason they don't speak at all. Was the budget that tight that they couldn't afford to pay them to speak that day or something?
19:55 Pat turns up. "You came!" Big hugs.
Estoy orgulloso de ti.
23:35 This scene where they're talking about Orange going to the ball, and whether Rebecque or Sharpe are going, is far too slow. Rebecque tells Sharpe to go and show off La Vicomtesse de Seleglise, who he calls "your affianced". Lo prometido (but why m form?)
25:00 Pat's too busy watching Sharpe ride away to turn round and check the money Doggett's giving him.
25:15 Rubbish - he just gets off the horse and lets it loose? In the books he's always very careful to tie up the horse. Except for the times he doesn't - there's a scene in (I think) Fury where Sharpe goes looking for Harper and he's so busy telling Pat what's going on that he just lets the horse wander off. Harper notices, of course, and looks after it. "Let me lead the horse, sir."
26:00 This is the scene where Sharpe is trying to look like a whole load of skirmishers in the book. Now he's got Harris and Hagman with him.
27:40 Sharpe turns up at the ball to give Wellington the intelligence he's gathered this afternoon. I wouldn't have much of a clue what was going on if I hadn't just read this bit in the book.
"Humbugged. Damn' well humbuggered."
Engañados - deceived
"You may keep the whore for an arsewipe". Eloquent.
Who's playing Harry Price? He looks familiar. Nicholas Irons, not ringing any bells. Doesn't seem to have done anything since 2010 when he was 40. Maybe he was only pretty. Ah, he actually is Jeremy Irons' son.
34:15 This farewell scene between Sharpe and Lucille doesn't use "Love Farewell". It has a twiddly arrangement of "Over the Hills and Far Away", presumably to give us confidence that this isn't really a parting. Or perhaps because Sharpe doesn't see it as a parting, he sees it as simply the prelude to a fight.
35:00 This scene of the men walking endlessly, inexorably, past Lucille's window works well to show the sheer numbers involved and how this event has basically taken over the world. I like the trumpet flares in amongst Over the Hills, it's very hopeful in its sound.
Watched up to 35:15, which looks like the beginning of the next day. Sharpe left Lucille in the dark and now it's daylight.
38:45 Even in the book Sharpe does far too much standing around watching for my liking, and it really doesn't work for the film, where I think they should have given him more action.
Ah, at last the bit where Sharpe and Harper are on horses at the side of the road and the South Essex march past and are pleased to see them, shouting out greetings. And the Colonel doesn't like it. "MY battalion. Paid for it. Paid enough for it, by God."
48:00 A good attempt at drama'ing things up with stirring music but having just read the book makes it even more glaringly apparent how they need a hundred times more men in this to make it realistic.
They've even reproduced "cooking a horse steak in a cuirasse" from the book. Nice. And the bit where Uxbridge complains that Nosey won't tell him what he's going to do on the morrow and Wellington says when Boney tells him, he'll tell Uxbridge.
59:20 OMG the way Sean is playing Sharpe being impatiently and falsely patient with Silly Billy is cracking me up. Very funny indeed.
59:50 Doggett is almost too low key, I keep not quite realising it's the same guy all the time. Mind you, he's kind of backgrounded in the book as well most of the time, somehow, even though Sharpe talks to him quite a lot.
59:55 Lampshading the fact that Sharpe is in a stable with Harper, not in an official billet with his name chalked on the door like we've just seen for Nosey, Uxbridge and Silly Billy.
STOPPING AT 1:05 31Jan22
1:05:45 Sharpe is wearing what looks like a brand-new shako and unusually for him he's had it on for at least three minutes so far.
1:17:30 Sharpe's getting a lot more hand-to-hand fighting in this than he does in the book. The book is similar to ?Fury? in that it defaults to being a lovingly detailed description of the battle and he remembers to mention Sharpe every now and then, rather than focussing on Sharpe. The tv show, understandably enough, is more visually focussed on Sharpe, so by the laws of drama he needs to be fighting rather than standing around making decisions.
1:20 ish. In the book Silly Billy sends infantry in line against cavalry three times. Here we're seeing the second time and Sharpe has just decided to abandon his post and go and do something useful. Ah, it was the South Essex just all got killed, unlike the book. Though presumably there will be some left for him to take command of at the end.
1:23:45 Showing the advancing hordes through a telescope is a reasonably clever way of hiding how few of them there are.
1:28 So we have a scene where Sharpe and Harper are talking about just leaving the battle and buggering off right now. Harper asks Sharpe where he will go if they leave now (because Sharpe can’t go back to Normandy if Bonaparte wins), and as Sharpe starts to answer, "Love Farewell" starts up in the background. Poignant parting music. For Sharpe and Harper.
And I point this out because this music is also heard in Sharpe’s Revenge, when Sharpe leaves Lucille to chase Ducos with General Calvet, and again at the end of the same episode when he leaves her to go back to England. It also plays earlier in Waterloo when Sharpe tells Lucille he’s going to fight Bonaparte.
As a committed slasher of long standing, what I take from this is that Tams’ and Muldowney’s choice of music for this scene is telling us it’s as devastating for Sharpe and Harper to contemplate parting again as it was for Sharpe and Lucille. This is imo supported by Pat looking sad and thoughtful when
Sharpe talks about France - Normandy - being his home now.
Then they hear the French cavalry charge and realised they can't do it.
"Shall we go back?"
"I think we will. We left many friends there."
1:30:30 In this one they seem to work so hard at putting in some of the tiny touches from the book - we've just seen the guy having trouble getting his saddle off his shot-down horse and the South Essex leave him alone and give him a cheer as he finally runs off - but they really don't work because they're too tiny and too random and they don't really last long enough to register.
1:31:50 Oh God, that actually is really moving, even though I've seen it before in a clip. And Sharpe is crying when he hears about it from Doggett.
1:34:00 Harper says, "They were soldiers, Hagman and Harris. They knew they would die." But Sharpe is taking this very personally indeed. As he does in the book tbf. I don't remember the death of Hagman in the book but the opening scene in Assassin is Sharpe personally digging Dan's grave.
1:34:35 Sharpe is really, really upset here. He says it's a hanging matter. He knows that, and he's still going to do it, because Hagman and Harris were his, he chose them. Then I think what's happened here is that MacDuff up in the roof has seen what he was going to do and fired in a different direction at the same time to disguise Sharpe's firing. I think it was done much better in the book, with Sharpe firing from behind/under Harper who took a valid shot in another direction at the same time. I'd love to have seen that filmed.
1:36:00 Sharpe and Harper have both abandoned their horses to run and join the battle against the Old Guard. Again, in the book, Sharpe was deliberately up on his horse so everyone could see him and know who was in command.
1:37:40 While Sharpe is working the South Essex against the advancing Old Guard, Harper is just standing there behind him, watching him.
And Sharpe has done it. He's picked up the South Essex entirely off his own bat and marched them and turned the Old Guard. And Wellington sees him do it. "Your battalion, Mr Sharpe."
1:38:00 When was this made, relative to Blackadder 4? Because the way this is shot, with it all going misty and slo-mo as the Old Guard retreat, is very similar to when they go over the top at the end of the last episode of Blackadder.
1:39:50 Goodbye Mr Harper - Sharpe grins and keeps marching while Pat stands there looking positively bereft. Mouth trembling and turned down at the corners, the works.
So the look-back this time was as Sharpe turned to look back at Harper. There was one other film where they did that, and I still infinitely prefer when we're behind him and he turns to look towards us then marches into tomorrow leaving us behind watching him go.
Considering they presumably knew at the time that this was likely to be the last film, it's a strangely random and untriumphant exit for Sharpe. It just goes a bit foggy and he fades in and out a bit through the gunsmoke then kind of fades off the bottom right hand corner into the credits. Not a tidy piece of work for the final goodbye. Yes, I know we later got Challenge and Peril, but they were 11 and 13 years after this and they definitely didn't know those would happen when they made Waterloo. According to Jason Salkey's book, everyone knew this was the end.
Oliver Tobias was Rebecque. He was very good.
As far as I remember, this is the first time I've ever watched this episode. Though I have no idea how many snippets I've seen on the clips channel or elsewhere. At this point I've read about a third of the book, and I aim to hit scenes in the book before the show. Yup, managed that. Finished the book before I finished the film.
1:55 A very fine distant shot of the farm with some of its best views...
3:45 Part of his reason for going - and he even says this to Lucille - is because he's never actually fought Napoleon himself.
4:20 His rifle is on the wall over the fire in the kitchen.
4:55 I can't remember who it was complained about Charles Woods' dialogue being very pompous, but I tend to agree.
Je me tais - yo detuve a mi lengua
Nous sommes tous mortales.
All their servants have left to go to the war for Napoleon.
The background music for this scene is - I think - "Will this moment last forever" as at the end of Revenge. Love Farewell.
5:45 Looks like Hagman there, getting on a cart. Yup. And Harris.
God, I'm crying already. A montage of scenes of various people all travelling along to the sound of Over the Hills and Far Away. Hagman and Harris in the cart, Harper riding a horse and leading ?three? others, looking very smart, a fine bright white neckcloth, Sharpe himself riding alone (although Lucille said she would go with him). He's got the old uniform on and he's smiling.
7:00 Slender Billy playing cricket with the nobs including Johnny Rossendale. Bitch face is there too. Wellington and Rebecque standing watching. Really - "Sharpe bowls fiendish" says Wellington? When did he do that?
Honestly, the expo is a bit clumsy here. What's called, I think, actress and bishop dialogue, just one person telling the other things that the audience need to know, all very straightforward and clunky. So now we and Rossendale know that Sharpe was a half-pay captain and is now a Colonel on Slender Billy's staff.
11:00 And now we've shifted to Sharpe scouting around to watch for the French marching.
12:25 And the first action is like ten men a side. From youtube comments, this episode is apparently the most embarrassingly inadequate in terms of portraying the fighting, which is one reason for doing the book first, so I understand what is actually supposed to be happening.
16:10 Bitchface is ordering Rossendale to kill Sharpe in the battle and then she can become Lady Rossendale. He doesn't exactly look thrilled at the prospect and his mother certainly won't be, apparently.
16:50 So here we have Harper selling a horse to Lt Doggett, and Hagman and Harris sitting around, when Sharpe rides up and goes into the ?inn? This might be the weird scene where for some reason they don't speak at all. Was the budget that tight that they couldn't afford to pay them to speak that day or something?
19:55 Pat turns up. "You came!" Big hugs.
Estoy orgulloso de ti.
23:35 This scene where they're talking about Orange going to the ball, and whether Rebecque or Sharpe are going, is far too slow. Rebecque tells Sharpe to go and show off La Vicomtesse de Seleglise, who he calls "your affianced". Lo prometido (but why m form?)
25:00 Pat's too busy watching Sharpe ride away to turn round and check the money Doggett's giving him.
25:15 Rubbish - he just gets off the horse and lets it loose? In the books he's always very careful to tie up the horse. Except for the times he doesn't - there's a scene in (I think) Fury where Sharpe goes looking for Harper and he's so busy telling Pat what's going on that he just lets the horse wander off. Harper notices, of course, and looks after it. "Let me lead the horse, sir."
26:00 This is the scene where Sharpe is trying to look like a whole load of skirmishers in the book. Now he's got Harris and Hagman with him.
27:40 Sharpe turns up at the ball to give Wellington the intelligence he's gathered this afternoon. I wouldn't have much of a clue what was going on if I hadn't just read this bit in the book.
"Humbugged. Damn' well humbuggered."
Engañados - deceived
"You may keep the whore for an arsewipe". Eloquent.
Who's playing Harry Price? He looks familiar. Nicholas Irons, not ringing any bells. Doesn't seem to have done anything since 2010 when he was 40. Maybe he was only pretty. Ah, he actually is Jeremy Irons' son.
34:15 This farewell scene between Sharpe and Lucille doesn't use "Love Farewell". It has a twiddly arrangement of "Over the Hills and Far Away", presumably to give us confidence that this isn't really a parting. Or perhaps because Sharpe doesn't see it as a parting, he sees it as simply the prelude to a fight.
35:00 This scene of the men walking endlessly, inexorably, past Lucille's window works well to show the sheer numbers involved and how this event has basically taken over the world. I like the trumpet flares in amongst Over the Hills, it's very hopeful in its sound.
Watched up to 35:15, which looks like the beginning of the next day. Sharpe left Lucille in the dark and now it's daylight.
38:45 Even in the book Sharpe does far too much standing around watching for my liking, and it really doesn't work for the film, where I think they should have given him more action.
Ah, at last the bit where Sharpe and Harper are on horses at the side of the road and the South Essex march past and are pleased to see them, shouting out greetings. And the Colonel doesn't like it. "MY battalion. Paid for it. Paid enough for it, by God."
48:00 A good attempt at drama'ing things up with stirring music but having just read the book makes it even more glaringly apparent how they need a hundred times more men in this to make it realistic.
They've even reproduced "cooking a horse steak in a cuirasse" from the book. Nice. And the bit where Uxbridge complains that Nosey won't tell him what he's going to do on the morrow and Wellington says when Boney tells him, he'll tell Uxbridge.
59:20 OMG the way Sean is playing Sharpe being impatiently and falsely patient with Silly Billy is cracking me up. Very funny indeed.
59:50 Doggett is almost too low key, I keep not quite realising it's the same guy all the time. Mind you, he's kind of backgrounded in the book as well most of the time, somehow, even though Sharpe talks to him quite a lot.
59:55 Lampshading the fact that Sharpe is in a stable with Harper, not in an official billet with his name chalked on the door like we've just seen for Nosey, Uxbridge and Silly Billy.
STOPPING AT 1:05 31Jan22
1:05:45 Sharpe is wearing what looks like a brand-new shako and unusually for him he's had it on for at least three minutes so far.
1:17:30 Sharpe's getting a lot more hand-to-hand fighting in this than he does in the book. The book is similar to ?Fury? in that it defaults to being a lovingly detailed description of the battle and he remembers to mention Sharpe every now and then, rather than focussing on Sharpe. The tv show, understandably enough, is more visually focussed on Sharpe, so by the laws of drama he needs to be fighting rather than standing around making decisions.
1:20 ish. In the book Silly Billy sends infantry in line against cavalry three times. Here we're seeing the second time and Sharpe has just decided to abandon his post and go and do something useful. Ah, it was the South Essex just all got killed, unlike the book. Though presumably there will be some left for him to take command of at the end.
1:23:45 Showing the advancing hordes through a telescope is a reasonably clever way of hiding how few of them there are.
1:28 So we have a scene where Sharpe and Harper are talking about just leaving the battle and buggering off right now. Harper asks Sharpe where he will go if they leave now (because Sharpe can’t go back to Normandy if Bonaparte wins), and as Sharpe starts to answer, "Love Farewell" starts up in the background. Poignant parting music. For Sharpe and Harper.
And I point this out because this music is also heard in Sharpe’s Revenge, when Sharpe leaves Lucille to chase Ducos with General Calvet, and again at the end of the same episode when he leaves her to go back to England. It also plays earlier in Waterloo when Sharpe tells Lucille he’s going to fight Bonaparte.
As a committed slasher of long standing, what I take from this is that Tams’ and Muldowney’s choice of music for this scene is telling us it’s as devastating for Sharpe and Harper to contemplate parting again as it was for Sharpe and Lucille. This is imo supported by Pat looking sad and thoughtful when
Sharpe talks about France - Normandy - being his home now.
Then they hear the French cavalry charge and realised they can't do it.
"Shall we go back?"
"I think we will. We left many friends there."
1:30:30 In this one they seem to work so hard at putting in some of the tiny touches from the book - we've just seen the guy having trouble getting his saddle off his shot-down horse and the South Essex leave him alone and give him a cheer as he finally runs off - but they really don't work because they're too tiny and too random and they don't really last long enough to register.
1:31:50 Oh God, that actually is really moving, even though I've seen it before in a clip. And Sharpe is crying when he hears about it from Doggett.
1:34:00 Harper says, "They were soldiers, Hagman and Harris. They knew they would die." But Sharpe is taking this very personally indeed. As he does in the book tbf. I don't remember the death of Hagman in the book but the opening scene in Assassin is Sharpe personally digging Dan's grave.
1:34:35 Sharpe is really, really upset here. He says it's a hanging matter. He knows that, and he's still going to do it, because Hagman and Harris were his, he chose them. Then I think what's happened here is that MacDuff up in the roof has seen what he was going to do and fired in a different direction at the same time to disguise Sharpe's firing. I think it was done much better in the book, with Sharpe firing from behind/under Harper who took a valid shot in another direction at the same time. I'd love to have seen that filmed.
1:36:00 Sharpe and Harper have both abandoned their horses to run and join the battle against the Old Guard. Again, in the book, Sharpe was deliberately up on his horse so everyone could see him and know who was in command.
1:37:40 While Sharpe is working the South Essex against the advancing Old Guard, Harper is just standing there behind him, watching him.
And Sharpe has done it. He's picked up the South Essex entirely off his own bat and marched them and turned the Old Guard. And Wellington sees him do it. "Your battalion, Mr Sharpe."
1:38:00 When was this made, relative to Blackadder 4? Because the way this is shot, with it all going misty and slo-mo as the Old Guard retreat, is very similar to when they go over the top at the end of the last episode of Blackadder.
1:39:50 Goodbye Mr Harper - Sharpe grins and keeps marching while Pat stands there looking positively bereft. Mouth trembling and turned down at the corners, the works.
So the look-back this time was as Sharpe turned to look back at Harper. There was one other film where they did that, and I still infinitely prefer when we're behind him and he turns to look towards us then marches into tomorrow leaving us behind watching him go.
Considering they presumably knew at the time that this was likely to be the last film, it's a strangely random and untriumphant exit for Sharpe. It just goes a bit foggy and he fades in and out a bit through the gunsmoke then kind of fades off the bottom right hand corner into the credits. Not a tidy piece of work for the final goodbye. Yes, I know we later got Challenge and Peril, but they were 11 and 13 years after this and they definitely didn't know those would happen when they made Waterloo. According to Jason Salkey's book, everyone knew this was the end.
Oliver Tobias was Rebecque. He was very good.