Re: Pearls Before Swine: Uncle Is Not Good With Money

On 1/17/2025 12:01 PM, Paul S Person wrote:

On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 12:46:59 -0500, Cryptoengineer
<petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:
 <snippo, topic is the recent /Napoleon/ movie and its historicity>
 

Not his whole life, but I heartily recommend the 1970 "Waterloo"
starting Christopher Plummer, Rod Steiger and Orson Wells.
>
I've seen analysis by historians to the effect that this is the
most historically accurate version of the battle ever filmed.

 Being by Bondarchuck, I would think so.
 

The battle was filmed in Ukraine. The Soviet Army lent the
production 17,000 soldiers, who were trained to drill and
'fight' in period style and uniforms. This was before CGI and
Maya, and if you see a soldier, he's real. This led to a
minor degree of randomness that underscores the reality of the
scene, details such random glints of sunlight off the bayonets
of a formation half a mile away.
>
This was by far the largest number of extras ever used in one
movie, and was said to be the 'seventh largest army in Europe'.

 Actually, <https://movieweb.com/movies-highest-number-extras/> has it
at 9th largest. The largest number is 300,000 for /Gandhi/.
 OTOH, the notes on Napolean indicate that it has the highest number of
/costumed/ extras. Which is odd, because it looks to me like the
30,000 extras in /Quo Vadis/ were wearing costumes. They were
certainly wearing /something/.
 But perhaps by "costume" they mean "military uniforms". This would
only work if most of the 50,000 extras in /Spartacus/, while part of
Spartacus' army, were not wearing military uniforms, as they were
mostly depicting runaway slaves.
 I should note that, in Russian, the "suit" in "business suit" is a
"kostyum", so it is possible that the Russian "kostyum" is being used
here for "miltiary uniform". When I was in the Army, the dress uniform
("Greens") was said to be the equivalent of a tuxedo (when worn with a
white shirt and black bow tie) so some flexibility may exist here.
 Or perhaps "costumed" is being used in a technical sense specific to
films (and perhaps stage plays). Maybe a simple robe that looks like
the robes warn back in the day worn over street clothes is not a
"costume".

More likely, its the operation of the Hollywood hype machine, and
not subject to any kind fact-checking or post-hoc justification.
Still, it was a heck of a lot of people. They were actually costumed
and drilled in Napoleonic style, not just a crowd.
pt