Guerre et Paix

This film version of Tolstoy's novel nicely captures the essence of his story. The VistaVision, Technicolor photography by Jack Cardiff give the the set pieces the look of a classic painting. Nino Rota's lavish score perfectly compliments the visuals. The casting is superb; and even though Fonda is physically wrong in the critical role of Pierre, his dignified persona makes up for it. Hepburn, as ever, is radiant as Natasha, and hits her marks perfectly. Anita Ekberg's superstructure alone brings Helene to life; Ferrer, Homolka and Mills are all, likewise, wonderful in this. The largely underappreciated Herbert Lom is absolutely brilliant as Napoleon. Practically speaking, this is a notable film adaptation of an enormous literary work, inspite of any comparisons one would care to make between the book and the movie.

If you want to bring such an vast, sweeping yet intensely human novel such as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace to the screen with both its breadth and depth intact you can do either one of two of things. You can film it page-for-page, and make an eight-hour behemoth, as Sergei Bondarchuk did with the 1960s Russian production. Or, you can prune it down to something more manageable, excising whole characters and subplots, but recreating certain sections of Tolstoy's work more or less verbatim to preserve what is vital about his work. This latter is the approach taken for Dino de Laurentiis's 1956 Italian-American co-production.

The narrative here focuses mainly on just three of Tolstoy's characters – Pierre, Natasha and Alexei – portrayed by Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer respectively. Fonda is really too old to play the youthful Pierre, but he is not as severely miscast as some have said, pulling off the early scenes of Pierre as the gangly, drunken student with a fair degree of believability. Hepburn brilliantly handles the aging of her character, transforming the naïve teenager into a mature and confident woman while still maintaining the same core persona. If only something as complementary could be said of Mel Ferrer, who takes to acting the same way anvils take to floating. His appallingness is matched only by the woman who plays his wife, Milly Vitale. There are some decent supporting players though. Herbert Lom gives a surprisingly heartfelt performance as Napoleon. Oskar Homolka brilliantly plays the archetypal scruffy old general who's too high-ranking and experienced to bother with all that decorum business, his gestures forceful but with a half-hearted brevity to them. And John Mills is bizarrely like someone out of a Monty Python film.

Director King Vidor was a veteran of old Hollywood and just the sort of director to handle the mix of big canvas and intimacy. He shows what must have been extraordinary patience in setting up hordes of extras, carts and cannons for authentic looking crowd scenes, but then makes them a briefly glimpsed backdrop, never really dwelling on the massive scope or showing it off for its own sake. This seemingly contradictory tack gives us a sense of the story happening in a real place, but never allows it to detract from the main players and their stories. Vidor is constantly implying things with the simplest of cinematic tricks, and this helps to make up for the gaps in plot that the adaptation necessitates. For example, when Hepburn and Vittorio Gassman kiss at the opera, the angle gradually changes to reveal the reflection of a door in a mirror. This subtle move plants the idea in our heads that someone may walk in on them, and it gives the moment a sense of unease and wrongness. Vidor's canny ability to suggest mood and temperament, particularly evident in his framing of the inner monologues during the dance scene, also helps to cover any deficit in the acting.

At three-and-a-half hours, this is still quite a long old movie. And yet, thanks to some compelling imagery and strong narrative it moves faster than many a 90-minuter. Shorn of much of Tolstoy's original material as it is, it is still long enough to give us that feeling of the passage of time and development of character, to make Fonda's transition from a foppish lad in Western European attire to a bearded man in Russian garb feel like more than just a change of clothes. This version of War and Peace certainly has a fair few things wrong with it, yet still manages to be a lucid and passionate – if not entirely faithful – adaptation of a great work of literature.

King Vidor's WAR AND PEACE was never going to do proper justice to Tolstoy's massive novel, certainly not at four hours and certainly not in production code era Hollywood, but for what it is, it is a decent spectacle. I'm not crazy about the film myself (but it must be noted that 1950s biblical and historical epics are genres I have no use for), though I am glad I watched it if only for one thing: Audrey Hepburn as Natasha. She was rarely as perfectly cast as she was here. The same cannot be said for Henry Fonda (too old) or Mel Ferrer (not that great an actor in general).

As another IMDb'er has mentioned, this film is one spectacular visual moment after another, but unfortunately with really terrible sound. The reason for the bad sound is that the film was produced at Cinecitta studios in Rome and at that time, all films there were shot without live sound. Everything was dubbed later: dialogue, music and all ambient sounds. In addition, recording facilities in Italy were primitive (this was only 11 years after the catastrophe of WWII), resulting in the canned quality of most of the dialogue. (One of the reasons Antonioni's films were such a breakthrough in the following decade was his use of live sound recording and location shooting).

Anyway, War and Peace is a most worthwhile film experience for Vidor and Cardiff's Technicolor Vistavision visuals, for the screenplay which is often quite beautifully written, and for many fine performances from some exceedingly charismatic film actors, especially the astonishing Audrey Hepburn. There are close-ups of her that will make your heart stop.

Quite a disappointing story about some people that get involved with each other. This makes the movie some swooning story about love (one might say it becomes some sort of Jane Austen story, which is not altogether bad, but has nothing to do with Tolstoy) It fails to capture the book's most beautiful moments: -Rostow's 'tremendous courage' when he flee-ed from advancing enemy forces after being wounded by his own horse. (Which showed the stupidity of war) -Pierre's duel (which is included, but not in very satisfying way (for instance, it misses Pierre's certainty that he would die in the duel and his flirt with death)) and the following conversion to freemasonry

What is worse, the film goes against the spirit of the book, when it emphasis's the prophesying moments. (While the book shows the exact counter case: the complete unpredictability where things would go next) Although I wouldn't name this a good effort to make a film out of 'War and Peace', I don't think it can be done in any satisfying way.