Waterloo

Waterloo (1970) is a Soviet-Italian historical epic directed by Sergei Bondarchuk — watch it online on iFILM. The film covers Napoleon's final chapter: abdication at Fontainebleau, the Hundred Days, and the few hours on June 18, 1815 outside Brussels that ended an era.

Rod Steiger plays Napoleon as a man already half-broken before the battle begins. Christopher Plummer's Wellington is cooler and more calculating — almost clinical. The contrast between them drives the film even before a single cannon fires. Orson Welles appears as Louis XVIII in a brief but commanding role. The battle itself was staged with over 15,000 Soviet Army soldiers as extras, giving the sequence a physical density that CGI has never quite replicated.

Bondarchuk doesn't assign heroes. The French lost 31,000 men; the coalition lost 21,000. The film ends on that number, not on a victory parade. For anyone drawn to large-scale historical cinema shot on location with practical means, this is one of the last true examples of the form. Stream Waterloo (1970) online on iFILM.