AdultFYI’s Oscar picks tonight: The King’s Speech for Best Picture and its leading man, Colin Firth, for Best Actor.

Two of the best films about war which probably no one’s ever seen are the very recent, The Centurion- which is about Rome’s legendary Ninth Legion that was supposedly wiped out by the Picts during a British invasion in 117 AD; and Waterloo starring the late Rod Steiger as Napoleon.

Steiger playing Napoleon, you say? If I hadn’t seen this movie when it first came out in the theaters in 1970, then again and again in my personal collection, you wouldn’t have convinced me of that bizarre idea of casting. Then, you have to consider the fact Brando tried playing Bonaparte with disastrous results in a throwaway 20th Century Fox picture titled Desiree, so why not Steiger.

Imagine Napoleon doing Stanley Kowalski from Street Car Named Desire and you’ve got an idea where Brando was heading with his acting Waterloo. Napoleon should have been encamped in New Orleans.

Steiger, on the other hand, also played Al Capone and watching that film is like looking at a young James Gandolfini. So Steiger could be a lot of different, amazing characters. He won an Oscar for playing a redneck sheriff In the Heat of the Night. But his Napoleon goes way beyond that award winning realm.

Here’s my Steiger story and I’m sticking to it. Years ago when he was still directing porn, John Bowen owned this magnificent old home near Dodgers Stadium. Someone else must have thought so too because it was selected to be a location for a film featuring Steiger, Burt Reynolds and Tom Berenger.

Bowen asked me if I’d like to come over and watch them shoot. Shit, yeah, but the P.A. starts giving me the rules of the house. The living room where the scene’s being shot is off limits and I have to stay in the kitchen with the rest of the unwashed and look at the action on a monitor.

I swear there was also a preclusion that I was not to stare into the eyes of Steiger and the others, just in the impossible event our paths would cross that evening. Just as well. It turned out to be a pretty crappy movie eventually titled The Hollywood Sign.

But if I had the chance to talk to Steiger that night it would certainly have been about Waterloo.

Story has it that Steiger and its director Sergei Bondarchuk had slightly differing opinions about how the character should be handled. Steiger wanted to portray Bonaparte as a drug addled loose cannon and he succeeds beyond you’re wildest expectations.

Having directed the epic TV Mini Series War and Peace, Bondarchuk was a stickler for historic accuracy, and the script of Waterloo is rife with details and juicy lines apparently uttered for real at the time.

When Wellington, played smartly and elegantly by Christopher Plummer is asked what his battle plan is, he replies, rather deadpan, “To beat the French, of course.”

After a blast of shrapnel, Wellington’s second in command looks down from his horse and states, “My God, I believe I lost my leg.”

Wellington comments dispassionately as though they’re at a cheerio, pip-pip tea party, “My God, I believe you have, sir.”

It’s pretty obvious where the sympathies lie for the film’s creators. The British generals are portrayed as fops and dandies and almost in awe of the fact that the French come to do battle equipped with swagger and brass bands. On the eve of the skirmish, the hardcore French are seen trudging through a thunder storm and mud while Wellington and his crew practically have to be dragged from a Cotillion and reminded there’s a campaign going on.

For their part, the French generals are seen as swaggering European matinee idols whose blind love and allegiance for a lunatic is a recipe for unmitigated disaster. Granted, a couple of them are egotistical maniacs in their own right. The great Irish actor with the rich baritone, Dan O’Herlihy as Marshall Ney is on the same level of narcissism as Napoleon and continually screams during a cavalry charge “I am Ney!” lest the British gunners mistake him for someone else.

At this said juncture, Ney decides to take the battle in his own hands. When he mistakes a British retrenchment for a full scale retreat he leads thousands of cavaliers into a literal Valley of Death. [Remember Charge of the Light Brigade?].

Amazingly, this bombastic maneuver nearly hands Wellington his ass on a plate if not for the 11th hour intervention of the Prussians under General von Blucher and the failure of Napoleon’s General Grouchy to cut off that support. Strategically and logistically, the actual battle was way more complicated than that, but abridgment and simplification, of course, is the filmmaker’s prerogative.

Sanguine, mellow and joking one minute, Steiger’s Napoleon is being pealed off the walls the next reminding everyone what he did at the battles of Marengo and Austerlitz when he begins issuing contradictory orders and is questioned about them.

When it comes to the unhinged, over the top screaming scene, no one’s better than Steiger. When it comes to infusing his battle tableaux with a sense of beauty, pageantry, grandeur, and the romance of galloping steeds, clanging sabers and a conflict’s ultimate price of carnage it’s Bondarchuk.

One of the head-on cavalry assaults is filmed in slow-motion with carousel music on the track. As totally whacked out as that sounds, it’s incredibly hypnotic to behold.

Plain and simple, this movie could never have been made in today’s dollars regardless of the miracles of blue screen. If there are supposed to be 100,000 smartly dressed soldiers in full battle regalia, and there’s probably way more than that, the camera sees every one of them in this broad, beautiful canvas.

And when the French brass strikes up the stirring March a Marengo, you just want to get on a horse and ride to the sound of the guns.