La Chartreuse de Parme

Fabrizio, Stendhal's hero, contrives to be present at the Battle of Waterloo without really seeing it, which is much the same as Christian-Jaque blithely turning a great novel into a routine swashbuckling vehicle for his willowy leading man. It demonstrates to what degree French cinéma de qualité was rather a matter of 'quantity', demanding a complacent accumulation of production values in lieu of the slightest vision or intelligence.