Review of “Danton” by Roger Ebert

November 18, 1983

The two poles of the French Revolution were the passionate idealism of the republic and the utter finality of the guillotine. “Danton” finds itself comfortable at those two extremes and leaves the parts in the middle—the facts, the issues, the minor personalities—to the historians.

This movie may not be an accurate record of the events of 1793 and 1794, and indeed in Paris the critics are up in arms over its inaccuracies. But as a record of the fiery passions and glorious personalities of the revolution, it is absolutely superb….

[Polish director Andrzej Wajda] has made a great historical picture, and one with sweat and grime all over it. Whenever I go to see any movie set in the past, I’m reminded of Jack L. Warner’s immortal instructions to his producers at Warner Bros., after a series of historical movies had bombed: “Don’t give me any more pictures where the people write with feathers.” The people in “Danton” write with feathers, and they wear wigs and strike poses, but they do it in scenes of such fierce belief that we forget everything except the moment.

The movie is basically about the conflict between two of the most striking personalities of the period, the two revolutionary leaders Danton and Robespierre, who were on the same side at the beginning but came to have fundamental philosophical differences that only the guillotine could settle.

Danton is played by Gerard Depardieu, that large, proletarian French actor who is so useful in roles where high-flown emotions need some sort of grounding. He makes his hoarse-voiced, idealistic speeches … sound like a football coach at halftime.

Robespierre is played by a Polish actor, Wojciech Pszoniak, as a self-obsessed hypochondriac whose political strategy seems largely determined by his need to make his headaches go away. Wajda's camera moves through 18^th century Paris with complete familiarity. He fills the city with the poor, with street people, with crooks and prostitutes and inflamed rabble, and there is always the sense of those crowds pressing outside …. For the first time in any movie about the French Revolution, I felt I was listening to people and not speeches.

NEW YORK TIMES MOVIE REVIEW

Danton (1982)

WAJDA’S “DANTON,” INSIDE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By VINCENT CANBY September 28, 1983

COMPARED to the massive scale of the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1789-95 seems almost to have been a chamber piece. Though armies supporting Louis XVI crossed France’s border seeking to save the Bourbon monarchy, and though all of France eventually become involved in the bloodshed, the most decisive battles of the Revolution were fought in Paris, in the political clubs and on the streets.

In Paris, the Revolution’s leaders, with the backing of the angry mobs, set policies that the rest of the country, left to their own devices, would probably have disowned, at least initially. The course of the Revolution was shaped by a small group of extraordinary men, all young, who started out as idealists, then became comrades and close friends, godfathers to one another’s children. Within four years, they had split into factions as mortal enemies. Men did not hesitate to send to the guillotine former boon companions, now branded as traitors to the fatherland.

This peculiar, dreadful intimacy of a handful of remarkable personalities is vividly dramatized in “Danton,” Andrzej Wajda’s fine, comparatively ascetic historical film . . . . Chief among these personalities are Georges Danton and Maximilien Robespierre. Danton is the passionate, vulgar, not entirely honest man of the people, a hugely popular leader of the Revolutionary left who becomes increasingly moderate as the Revolution adopts policies of extermination. Robespierre, called “the incorruptible,” is the small, fastidiously dressed, rigorously moral lawyer from Arras who, being convinced that Danton’s moderation is a betrayal of the Revolution, engineers his trial and execution. “Robespierre, you will follow me within three months!” the furious Danton screams as he is hauled off to the guillotine and, as things turned out, he was absolutely right.

“Danton,” a Franco-Polish co-production, was directed in France by Mr. Wajda from a screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere, based on a stage play by Stanislawa Przybyszewska. Gerard Depardieu, who is, of course, a French actor, stars as the sympathetic Danton. Wojciech Pszoniak, a Polish actor, shares star billing as the thin-lipped voice of reason, Robespierre. . . , who is seen as being completely removed from the practical needs and real feelings of the people, a stern father-figure of a dictator, a man who doesn’t hesitate to approve the murder of thousands of people for the fatherland’s ultimate good. . . .

“Danton” brilliantly illuminates one of the most fascinating periods of the French Revolution—those early months in 1794 when Danton, having been in self-imposed retirement in the country, returned to Paris to attempt to stop the Terror. Louis had been beheaded in January 1793. By October 1793, the Terror was picking up momentum, with the execution of Marie Antoinette, the liberal-thinking Duc D’Orleans, the chatty, letter- writing Madame Roland, and the leaders of the Girondists, the Revolution’s moderates. In returning to Paris instead of fleeing the country, as his friends advised him to do, Danton knew he was leaving his head exposed to the guillotine. . . .

It’s to Mr. Wajda’s credit that though his sympathies are clearly with Danton, played with all stops out by Mr. Depardieu, it is Robespierre, played with silky neuroticism by Mr. Pszoniak, who emerges as the film’s most arresting, possibly tragic figure. Not so effective are those scenes that attempt to place the personal-political drama in the context of a city and a nation in rebellion. There is something as perfunctory as there is obligatory about the crowd scenes. . . .

Mr. Wajda and Mr. Carriere haven’t exactly cleaned up Danton’s reputation, but the bad things remain off-screen. There are references to the taking of bribes, to his love of women and property, and he himself asks forgiveness for having formed the notorious Committee of Public Safety, the body through which Robespierre came to control the country. Not emphasized at all is Danton’s part in the September 1793 massacre in which mobs were encouraged to ransack Paris prisons and, without discrimination, murder everyone they could lay hands on as agents of the feared monarchist counterrevolution. . . What the film does most effectively is dramatize [Danton’s] later conviction that the Revolution’s fury was itself a betrayal of the Revolution.