The Napoleonic Wars Wars are so ripe for modern costume dramatists.

They have all the pride, prejudice, ripped bodices, heaving decolotage, floppy shirts, tall boots, sword fights,

cavalry charges, cannon fuselage, haughts, haughty manners, skinny mustaches, and mutton dinners that put

modern moviegoers' butts and seats.

But no one makes Napoleon movies.

Every season we suffer through another spate of dreary, not my daughter, revenge blood baths and

bald man car chase, hamburger bang-bang-bang-i-Q reducers.

Karen wants to speak to the manager romcoms that are neither. Murder clown forever alone

jackfests and witless groin-kicking conspiracy hump and spy movie money flushes brought to you

by Zappos, why are there not 15 the

Polyonic era sex comedy dramatainments a year?

Let me tell you, literature, with a capital L, has got us covered.

The golden age of the novel started a hundred years

before the golden age of Hollywood,

so just as movie makers love World War II,

the world of literature loves Napoleon and all he wrought. War and peace,

Le Miserables. The Count of Monte Cristo, pretty much every author from Jane Austin to Dasteevsky had a go at it.

And it helped that the romantic poets suffused the whole era with dewdrenched wastecoats and tear-soaked lace,

laudanum, morphing morphine and amber grie such that dying of a saber

wound was every young lover's dream, all the better if you were covered in epillets.

I am practically ready to join the 19th century British Navy as I sit here telling you this.

And just as Hollywood keeps dropping bombs down Pearl Harbor's poor funnel stacks, nearly 80 years later,

...