Napoleon: This cut scene could have seen the ending differently

To say that Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is divisive is an understatement. Between supporters of the director’s claimed artistic and fictional liberties and historians (at least some of them) who cringe at some of the director’s problematic, not to mention heretical, choices, critical material is particularly abundant. Never mind Scott, who quietly sweeps it under the rug.

So Scott ends his story with the island of St. Helena, where Napoleon lived a second time in exile; which this time will be final. Under the strict control of his British prison, Hudson Law, the governor of this lost stone on the African coast, is haunted by the voice of the fallen emperor Josephine.

Like the ending of The Godfather III, which saw a very old Michael Corleone reminiscing about the past with his family, sitting on a small patio chair before collapsing, Napoleon watches two young men play in the garden of his Longwood home. Girls play with sticks.

and rewrite its history and already its legend. “Do you know who burned Moscow?” tells them. They answered in the affirmative, the young girls say that they are Russians. “no it’s me” answers them. Before literally falling out of the frame a bit later, reduced and faded over the years.

It is also a means of speculation without showing the emperor’s illness, which eventually led to his death on May 5, 1821. If rumors have long blamed arsenic poisoning, Napoleon died of stomach cancer.

Napoleon sat on the throne

It turns out that the director had previously planned to shoot a scene or shot that should have happened much earlier; Shortly before the Battle of Waterloo. But which will remain in the state of the script; And that’s why it was never filmed. This shot was supposed to show the emperor sitting on the toilet and noticing blood in his stool. A likely result of hemorrhoids, which were common among riders who spent a lot of time on horseback.

Or just a way to talk about stomach cancer. Blood in the stool is a symptom of both colorectal cancer and stomach cancer. The stool may have a reddish color if the bleeding is in the lower part of the digestive system. which made it possible to connect with the final frame of the film.

That’s why Ridley Scott stopped filming the scene at the last minute, as he explained in his full-length interview, which was released He is a Yorker : “When it got closer to the film’s release date, I didn’t have the courage to shoot it.