For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The acting in this movie is really good.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The Napoleonic wars take on a comic twist with an "I'm so amusing!" attitude that makes it not quite so funny. It's history meets a combination of Mel Brooks, Monty Pyton and Benny Hill with a bit of the 40's style of the Gainsborough films thrown in. Based on stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ("Sherlock Holmes"), this is obviously influenced by the success of the Oscar Winning "Tom Jones", and ends up there with later historical spoofs, "Joseph Andrews" and "Yellowbeard", which were complete disasters.The legendary Eli Wallach is commanding as Napoleon, but his character becomes a joke from the get go with unfunny jokes about his height and made to look like a buffoon. That worked with Mel Brooks' assail on Hitler but here, it just isn't funny. Peter McEnerey plays the title character, a pompous colonel, tongue too far in cheek to be funny. Only Walkach and Claudia Cardinale as a Spanish countess are worthy of praise. The film is handsome to look at, but has a muffled sound recording that sounds like very bad dubbing.

Leonard Maltin has been overly harsh with his BOMB ratings quite a few times, but unfortunately he's not too far off the mark on this one. "The Adventures Of Gerard" comes from the "Casino Royale" (1967) school of comedy - the more money the producers spend, the funnier the film is supposed to be. It's really quite an imposing, big-scale production with lots of extras, horses, explosions, etc. But there are no laughs in it. The puzzlingly bad script is based on an Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) story - I'm assuming a lot of it got botched in translation (4 different people working on the same script is usually not a good sign). Eli Wallach must be the most miscast Napoleon ever, and even the absolute goddess Claudia Cardinale cannot help this disaster much. * out of 4.

I don't think this movie is much to get excited about either but I don't agree that the "easily entertained" are stupid or that they should be "ignored" because of some perception of same, valid or no. I also think that when being dictatorial rather than critical which is the proper tone for a review, one should know the difference in meaning between "fitfully" and "fittingly." When it comes to stupidity, let he who is without etc.... I have seen more than one film which I thought was "stupid" but rarely do I think that people who disagree with my opinion are "stupid" simply because they like something I don't. I am also uncomfortable with the notion that their right to be entertained is predicated on their personal taste.

I've only seen half this film on late-night TV so I can't be sure if it's really good or not. The bit I did see was charming. McEnery is fabulous as the Conan-Doyle hero, Cardinale is as lovely as ever and Eli Wallach hams beautifully.There's lots of running about deserty parts of Spain and amusing asides to the camera by Gerard, including the perfect way to get your boots off.There are also very weirdly filmed (and plain weird) sequences that put this film far above other silly 1960s "romp films" (is that a genre?). The best example is a stunning slow-mo bit where a bandit with his head popping up in the middle of table is killed William Tell fashion by his preposterously debonair chief.I'd love to see the rest but it hasn't got a DVD release (I don't think it even had a VHS release) and is very rarely screened on telly. Like at lot of Euro-productions, it's uneven, often badly dubbed and was probably panned at the time, with most people involved having forgotten about it (or trying to forget about it). Perhaps it's a great "undiscovered" comedy film. It's at least worthy of a bit more attention.And what happened to Peter McEnery? He was great in this and as Mr Sloane. The results on this site show he's been condemned to TV mini-series for 25 years.