War and Peace (Preview)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Directed by Sergei Bondarchuk; screenplay by Sergei Bondarchuk and Vasily Solovyov, based on Leo Tolstoy’s novel; photographed by Anatoly Petritsky; production design by Mikhail Bogdanov, Alexander Dikhtyar, Said Menyalshchikov, and Gennady Myasnikov; edited by Tatyana Likhacheva; starring Sergei Bondarchuk, Ludmila Savelyeva, Vyacheslav Tikhonov, Boris Zakhava, Anatoly Ktorov, and Irina Gubanova. A two-disc Blu-ray box set, color, 422 min., Russian dialogue with English subtitles, 1966–67. A Criterion Collection release.

In an interesting Cold War happenstance, the cinematic history of War and Peace hinges to some extent on Audrey Hepburn, the vibrant Natasha in King Vidor’s 1956 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel. Appearing in the studio era’s greatest decade of big-screen sprawl, Vidor’s epic (an Italy–U.S. co-production) drew far fewer American viewers than, say, Henry Koster’s The Robe of 1953 or William Wyler’s Ben-Hur of 1959. But it enthralled Soviet audiences, selling a more than respectable thirty million tickets to moviegoers less impressed with the film’s wobbly grasp of Russian history and culture than with Hepburn’s unquenchable allure.

Aggrieved that the capitalist West had so successfully capitalized on Russia’s most celebrated literary treasure, the Soviet cultural establishment went to work on a War and Peace of its own. The cast, crew, and locations would be more authentically Russian than anything Hollywood could fabricate, and when Sergei Bondarchuk landed the job of directing the film, all the resources of the state-run movie industry were placed at his fingertips. An early decision was to find a Natasha who was true to Tolstoy’s original—naive, inexperienced, childlike—in ways a seasoned star like Hepburn couldn’t match. The role went to a teenage ballerina with no acting experience, and viewers of all nationalities can decide whether she outshines Hepburn via the Criterion Collection’s new edition of Bondarchuk’s film, now restored to a reasonable facsimile of the seven-hour 70mm spectacle that opened in Moscow in two installments in 1966 and 1967.

Tolstoy’s novel is too long and detailed to summarize here, but a quick recap won’t hurt. Set in the early nineteenth century, it has three main characters. One is Pierre Bezukhov, a portly, good-hearted aristocrat who moves from reverence for Napoleon to horror of the Napoleonic Wars that pulse through the narrative. Another is the melancholy Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, saddled with an unhappy marriage and a dour attitude toward the warfare that sweeps him into its savage grasp. The third is Natasha Rostova, the gifted, ineffably romantic daughter of a wealthy old count.

In keeping with its title, the tale combines wartime action, violence, and terror with peacetime dramas of love, rivalry, jealousy, ambition, and hope. An enormous number of people play major and minor parts in the exfoliating subplots, digressions, and detours, which are invariably clear and lucid, notwithstanding Henry James’s opinion that novels of this ilk are “large loose baggy monsters.” The book is long but the opposite of rambling or unreadable. The same is true of Bondarchuk’s adaptation, although I recommend taking its divided structure seriously; the movie comprises four sections, each with opening titles and closing credits, so spread the experience over a couple of days. Weekends are its natural habitat.

At least five Russian adaptations of War and Peace were produced in the prerevolutionary period, but decades passed before a sound film version arrived. According to a terrifically informative Criterion extra by film scholar Denise J. Youngblood, the delay stemmed from Marxist uneasiness with the religious mysticism that Tolstoy embraced in his later life. The anxiety eased when Nikita Khrushchev’s regime instituted its famous “thaw,” loosening the dire strictures of Joseph Stalin’s rule and facilitating the U.S.–USSR cultural exchanges that brought Vidor’s epic to Soviet screens in 1959. Conditions were now right for a War and Peace on Russian terms, with a Pierre who was actually chubby—playing the role himself, Bondarchuk put on considerable weight, unlike Henry Fonda, the svelte lead in Vidor’s picture—and a Natasha with a face as fresh as her personality.

As if the seven-hour feature weren’t enough to keep cinephiles busy, the Criterion edition includes quite a few extras, and a recurring theme is how unhappy people were having Bondarchuk in the director’s chair. Here again Youngblood sheds much light, offering a lengthy list of reasons for the antipathy. Perhaps the most important was the fact that while Bondarchuk was a truly distinguished actor—named a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union at the young age of thirty-two—he had directed only one movie, the intimate 1959 drama Fate of a Man, about a troubled military veteran. Why shouldn’t a large-scale project like War and Peace go to a director with large-scale credentials, or at least varied and extensive ones? Professional envy was exacerbated by Bondarchuk’s rural background, which made him a bumpkin in some eyes, and his demeanor, which many found egotistical and overbearing. In the Marxist studio system, artistic teamwork was valued over individual creativity—not the ideal setting for someone who believed the director was “the czar and the god” of his domain.

Colleagues on the set were as critical as Bondarchuk’s directorial rivals. His first cinematographer left before shooting started; the two that followed quit when the “monster” made too many demands; and their successor, the relatively untested Anatoly Petritsky, uses his Criterion interview to diss the director all these years later. Whatever the main causes, Bondarchuk was mighty unpopular among his peers—even his son, filmmaker Fedor Bondarchuk, mentions this in a Criterion interview—and a number of his first-choice actors turned him down because they couldn’t stand the idea of working for him over three solid years, much less the five years that it eventually took to complete the production.

The best argument in Bondarchuk’s favor is simply that he pulled the picture off, assisted by the resources that flowed when the Soviet government designated it a “state commission” with an open-ended schedule and a virtually unlimited budget. Some twenty-five thousand costumes and uniforms were sewn by hand; hairdressers were imported from Paris to craft the coiffures for Natasha’s first ball; the military assigned high-level generals to help with combat scenes; the ballroom was equipped with camera towers and cranes; a replica of old Moscow was built, honeycombed with camera tracks, and burned spectacularly to the ground; and unusually for a Soviet production, all outdoor shooting was done on location, necessitating lengthy waits for proper weather conditions…

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Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2