Pretty Good

best movie i've ever seen.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The film is not bad, it's obvious how much they worked for its realization, but it is inferior to Sergey Bondarchuk's homonymous film. The actors, with the exception of Audrey Hepburn and Oskar Homolka, they are not at all fit. Vittorio Gassman, Herbert Lom, Henry Fonda, they were very good actors, but not here in this "War and Peace".

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.

I'm a little biased in my judgement of this film – not only because I've read the novel, but also because I've seen Sergei Bondarchuk's 1960s Soviet adaptation, which is undoubtedly one of cinema's most spectacular epics. Any comparison leaves Vidor's Hollywood adaptation, for all its merits, beaten and conquered. Despite clocking in at a respectable 200 minutes, 'War and Peace (1956)' is simply too short to do justice to Tolstoy's vision. The episodic nature of the novel means that it can't be readily condensed into a regular feature-length time frame, and the film's narrative is often choppily composed to fit everything in.I think I'm forever destined to imagine the main characters as they appear in the 1960s film, but the main actors here are nevertheless passable. Henry Fonda, sporting a misplaced American twang, brings an accurate passivity of the role of Pierre Bezukhov. Audrey Hepburn half works: early on, her Natasha Rostova lacks the vibrant, bright-eyed naiveté of Lyudmila Savelyeva, but the actress portrays beautifully the compassion and weariness of the "grown-up" Natasha. The battle scenes are large in scale, but curiously narrow in scope, with the Battle of Borodino – in the 1960s film, an astonishing hour of unfettered pandemonium viewed through a God-like lens – seen mostly through the eyes of Pierre.

Any allusion to Tolstoy's masterpiece in connection with this film can only be considered libel. The film fails on virtually every level and bears no thematic, emotional, intellectual or philosophical relationship to that great novel. With so many flaws, all that remains is a perfectly ridiculous farce. But it is pretty.One can gain a cursory introduction to Tolstoy's novel from this film, but little else. Tolstoy envisioned a colossal and sweeping epic of cultural upheaval amidst an intricate tapestry of human drama set against the French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. King Vidor seems to have in mind something a little more akin to a saccharin, tawdry melodrama with great costumes.The casting decisions are completely incomprehensible. Although I adore Audrey Hepburn and, when properly cast, she was beyond compare, as the complex and conflicted Natasha Rostova her strengths become weaknesses. As the sprightly ingénue, or the naïve gamin, she set the screen on fire. Moreover, as she was, in fact, an aristocrat, her regal bearing is sublime.There are, however, qualities in the great characters of Russian literature that were simply not within Hepburn's repertoire. Her memorable turn as Holly Golightly may have transformed Capote's layered character into a shallow, though thoroughly delightful, scatterbrain, but her incomparable radiance made it all worthwhile. Sadly, a similarly simplified Natasha did not play as well.Hepburn's then husband, Mel Ferrer, was equally miscast as the vain and sardonic Prince Andrei. To be fair, he would have been miscast in any serious role, as he was a positively dreadful actor, but like most of the cast, he fails to reflect any of the impact that war can have on people's lives or the epic cultural shifts that were taking place in Russia at the time.Neither of these sins can hold a candle, however, to the casting of Henry Fonda as Pierre Bezukhov. First, he was, by his own acknowledgment, far too long in the tooth for the role, which he says he merely took for the money. More to the point, his bumpkin blank stares and cloying American earnestness, and a ubiquitous curiously pained expression that defies explanation, his stock in trade in more successful efforts, smother any subtlety that the role requires. Wandering through epic battles like a cow grazing mindlessly in a football field, he could not be more ridiculous. Granted Pierre's application of gematria to determine that Napoleon was the Biblical Antichrist may have been a bit much to put on the big screen in 1956, but are we truly to accept Fonda's placid counting to one thousand to keep his feet from freezing as a reasonable substitute? I suppose that had the film been called "Pretty French and Russian Uniforms" it would have been less objectionable and certainly more honest, but then who would have watched it? As "War and Peace" it is more epic failure than truly epic.In one scene Fonda as Pierre stands inexplicably on a great battlefield and mutters, "Damn you Napoleon. Damn you to hell." He should have directed this curse at King Vidor, the true villain of the piece, for squandering the legitimate talents of Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda and, one must not forget, Leo Tolstoy on this travesty. Damn you King Vidor. Damn you to hell.