FREE FILM PITCH: A Forgotten Man*

*Or if you’re Ridley Scott, you didn’t care that he existed in the first place.

I’m going to do this periodically just for giggles. Take a historic thing and make a film pitch, 99.5% because I get to be sarcastic and have some fun but 0.5% in the hope that someone relevant sees it and writes me a big cheque to do a script…

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I want you to picture this Hollywood historical epic style: a grizzled old man on a horse, in the pi**ing rain, sideways rain. The sky is grey, he’s soaked to the skin. Soon, he’s going to win the battle of Waterloo. And his name is not Wellington.

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His name is Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher and on the eve of Waterloo he is nearly 73 years old. Which in the early 1800s, let’s face it, without antibiotics, a winter fuel allowance or stairlifts is a miracle in itself.

Casting Suggestion: Torn between Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. The big booming theatre voice is a must.

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His life is a Hollywood biopic waiting to happen. Blücher was born in Rostock, which was in one of all those little German duchies and cities and castles that aren’t a unified country yet in history. His father was a retired army captain, and his family were long-time minor nobility. That won’t do for the film tho, suggest we make his beginnings more humble and stick him on a fishing boat in the Baltic.

Picture him scampering around Rostock, and then joining the Swedish army as a stringy adolescent. We can drama this up a bit. Perhaps he steals some fish and has to make himself scarce.

At 18, he’s down on his luck, captured by Prussians in 1760 in Pomerania. In my head, this means he’s captured by a battalion of puffy little dogs. When, plot twist, he changes sides after an existential montage to 80s rock music in which he wrestles with his decision and decides being Prussian is better than a prison cell.

The die was cast. Well, for a few years. We can have a lesser battle scene set at the end of the Seven Years’ War as he starts making a name for himself. 

But then he reaches that point in the story where you think he’s done. Because Blücher comes with multiple bouts of built in adversity. Like a lot of high ranking military nutters in history, he’s rubbish at normal adulting when there was no war to fight. He was prone to being a dick. At one point he played out a mock execution of a Polish priest suspected of being in favour of some 1772 uprisings. This cost him a promotion (only to Major, he’s arguably way too lowly ranked to have such an attitude at this point) which led to a row with Frederick the Great.  He had to resign for being insubordinate. Frederick told him to go to the devil. High drama. Check.

Casting Suggestion: Mark Rylance, or anyone with gravitas who looks like an accountant.

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Cue the part in the film where he becomes a farmer, drinks a lot of schnapps, smashes some things up and grows a big beard for 13 years. This montage is like the one of Rocky training in Russia. In reality, he did quite well, made money and became a freemason but we might want to tone this down. People like their heroes more underdoggy. 

Then. Frederick dies. Hurrah, Blücher can have his job back. And the rank he wanted. Back to the Red Hussars he goes. 

If this was an old school epic this is where the interval would be. This is his Scarlett O’Hara’s ‘As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again’ moment. We can have him standing outside his rugged farmhouse, equivalent of telegram in hand, whatever they had then, and slinging his shovel to the floor in disgust with the other, spitting out the raw potato he’s been condemned to eating out out of sheer poverty on the floor. And naturally calling for someone to bring him his horse.

As he gets successively promoted for bashing the French you’re thinking, this guy has arrived! But no. There is more adversity to come. This is where his vendetta with Napoleon comes in, because in 1806, Napoleon made him look very, very stupid. 

Blücher was commanding cavalry when he took a complete beating from the French and ended up being taken prisoner. His surrender is epically snotty, he wants it written in that he only gave in because he ran out of food and ammunition.

Then he had a complete breakdown, where he thought he was giving birth to an elephant, which is going to make for another very trippy montage. 

Now we’re into Act III and the home stretch…

So how do you come back from this? You boot the French out of Paris, punt Napoleon off his throne, and march into the French capital. That’s how. By 1814 he’s done this. 

If Napoleon has got nothing nice to say about you then you’re winning: Napoleon said Blücher had no talent for a general. (Not the one that ends up losing tho)

But Napoleon admired his attitude to be like a bull that looks all around him with rolling eyes, and when he sees danger, charges. Napoleon said he was stubborn and untiring, knowing no fear. He called him an old rascal that attacked him with the same fury after the most terrible beating as he would be on his feet again the next moment and ready for the fight. 

Casting Suggestion: Anyone but Joaquin Pheonix. Literally anyone.

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And fight he did during the Waterloo Campaign. In a precursor to the main battle at Ligny, he spent hours lying under his dead horse and survived being repeatedly rode over by cavalry. Don’t forget he is almost 73. Was he done? No. We can make him look dead, we just see an arm sticking out from underneath the horse go still, for at least ten seconds, then… his finger twitches.

Blücher bathed his wounds in a tantalising mix of garlic and rhubarb, drunk a lot of schnapps and resumed command in time for 18th June 1815. This is where we have him dragging himself onto his horse, stinking of garlic and groaning in pain to ride into the big finale. 

Blücher is the commander you want. He’s not miserable like Boney or detached like Wellington. This is a quote as he made to bail out the British: 

“Forwards! I hear you say it's impossible, but it has to be done! I have given my promise to Wellington, and you surely don't want me to break it? Push yourselves, my children, and we'll have victory!" 

The big “Vorwarts Mo-Fos” moment

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And without him, the Duke of Wellington would not be getting all the credit for Waterloo. In short, the coalition force was utterly buggered, until Blücher came and saved the day. 

We can just have him dismount and lead this himself. More epic, nobody cares about facts and logic. According to Ridley.

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‘With the battle hanging in the balance, Blücher's army intervened with decisive and crushing effect, his vanguard drawing off Napoleon's badly needed reserves, and his main body being instrumental in crushing French resistance. This victory led the way to a decisive victory through the relentless pursuit of the French by the Prussians. The two Coalition armies entered Paris on 7th July.’

So because he was as old as dirt and not dead, because he triumphed over adversity a lot, because he made more managerial comebacks, despite his own personality than Jose Mourinho and because he is the true victor in Britain’s greatest ever battlefield victory, make a film about Blücher, please. 

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