[5][6] It stars Rod Steiger as Napoleon Bonaparte and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington with a cameo by Orson Welles as Louis XVIII of France.
[7] Other stars include Jack Hawkins as General Sir Thomas Picton, Virginia McKenna as the Duchess of Richmond and Dan O'Herlihy as Marshal Ney.
[9] The film takes a largely neutral stance and portrays many individual leaders and soldiers on each side, rather than simply focusing on Wellington and Napoleon.
It creates a generally accurate chronology of the events of the battle, the extreme heroism on each side, and the loss of life suffered by all the participating armies.
[8] Despite mixed critical reviews, it won several awards, including BAFTAs for Best Costume Design and Best Art Direction, and the 1971 David di Donatello for Best Film.
In Brussels during the Duchess of Richmond's ball, the Duke of Wellington is warned of Napoleon's march into Belgium, tactically driving a wedge between the British and Prussian armies.
To recreate the battlefield "authentically", the Soviets bulldozed away two hills, laid five miles of roads, transplanted 5,000 trees, sowed fields of rye, barley and wildflowers and reconstructed four historic buildings.
Most of the battle scenes were filmed using five Panavision cameras simultaneously – from ground level, from 100-foot towers, from a helicopter, and from an overhead railway built right across the location.
[18] However, the authentic nature of the topography is questionable and has more to do with dramatic panoramic filmshots rather than topographical accuracy: in reality, the Waterloo site is laid out as a series of low hillocks with few opportunities for long views.
The battle sequences of the film included about 15,000 Soviet foot soldiers and 2,000 cavalrymen as extras and 50 circus stunt riders were used to perform the dangerous horse falls.
[19] Months before the cameras started filming, the 17,000 soldiers began training to learn drill and battle formations, as well as the use of sabres, bayonets and handling cannons.
Each day after breakfast, they marched to a large wardrobe building, donned their French, British or Prussian uniforms and fifteen minutes later were in position.
To assist in the direction of this huge, multi-national undertaking, the Soviet director had four interpreters permanently at his side: one each for English, Italian, French and Serbo-Croatian.
The meagre box office results of Waterloo led to the cancellation of Stanley Kubrick's planned film biography of Napoleon.
Like a Willy Loman not wholly aware that he has lost his territory, he alternately schemes and complains -— as if, in addition to all his other achievements, he had discovered at Waterloo the sources of theatrical naturalism.
It is an awful performance, and every mannered point of it is emphasized by the elephantine selectivity of Bondarchuk's camera -— narrowing upon the eyes, a weary fold of flesh, the carefully hunched back, the hat, the pudgy man's walk.
While the film portrays the events of the Hundred Days quite faithfully, including some allusions to and scenes from the Battle of Ligny and of Quatre Bras, there were a few departures from historical fact, presumably made for artistic purposes, and some characters act as ciphers for others.
Perhaps the biggest inaccuracy in the film is the battleground itself: having had torrential rain the previous night, which delayed the French attack until midday, the battlefield was extremely muddy.
However, here, as elsewhere, the film replicates a famous painting of the battle, in this case Elizabeth Thompson's 1881 work Scotland Forever!, which depicts the Royal Scots Greys galloping towards the enemy.
Further, Ponsonby, commander of the Union Brigade, is believed to have initially been taken prisoner by French cavalry, before being killed during a failed rescue attempt.
(Around 7:30 p.m., another Prussian corps under Marshal Blücher arrived on the battlefield to link with the British army on the grounds of the inn La Belle Alliance, sealing the fate of the French force—as shown in the film.)
Prussian infantry in the film was depicted wearing black coats, which was only prevalent in certain militia bands such as the Lützow Free Corps.
The Duke at the time, the founder and colonel of the regiment, was the Duchess of Richmond's father, and he saw no active service overseas during the Napoleonic Wars.
His son and the Duchess's brother, the Marquis of Huntly (later the 5th Duke) was a distinguished general, but held no command in the campaign, although anecdotal evidence suggests that he arrived during the aftermath of the battle.
Another branch of the family was represented by another ADC, Colonel Sir Alexander Gordon, aged twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the brother of the Earl of Aberdeen.
The field commander of the Gordon regiment during the campaign, Lieutenant Colonel, John Cameron of Fassiefern, had been killed at the battle of Quatre Bras on 16 June.