War and Peace (1956)

Napoleon's (Herbert Lom's) tumultuous relations with Russia including his disastrous 1812 invasion serve as the backdrop for the tangled personal lives of two aristocratic families.

Director:

King Vidor

Writers:

Leo Tolstoy (based on the novel by), Bridget Boland (adaptation)

Stars:

Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer

Nominated for 3 Oscars. Another 5 wins & 10 nominations.

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Audrey Hepburn	...	Natasha Rostova
Henry Fonda	...	Pierre Bezukhov
Mel Ferrer	...	Prince Andrei Bolkonsky
Vittorio Gassman	...	Anatol Kuragin
Herbert Lom	...	Napoleon
Oskar Homolka	...	Field Marshal Kutuzov (as Oscar Homolka)
Anita Ekberg	...	Helene Kuragina
Helmut Dantine	...	Dolokhov
Tullio Carminati	...	Prince Vasili Kuragin
Barry Jones	...	Prince Mikhail Andreevich Rostov
Milly Vitale	...	Lisa Bolkonskaya
Lea Seidl	...	Countess Rostov
Anna Maria Ferrero	...	Maria Bolkonskaya
Wilfrid Lawson	...	Prince Bolkonsky (as Wilfred Lawson)
May Britt	...	Sonia Rostova

Storyline

By 1812, Napoleon's (Herbert Lom's) forces controlled much of Europe. Russia, one of the few countries still unconquered, prepares to face Napoleon's troops together with Austria. Amongst the Russian soldiers, are Count Nikolai Rostov (Jeremy Brett) and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Mel Ferrer). Count Pierre Bezukhov (Henry Fonda), a friend of Andrei's, and self-styled intellectual, who is not interested in fighting. Pierre's life changes when his father dies, leaving him a vast inheritance. He is attracted to Natasha Rostov (Audrey Hepburn), Nikolai's sister, but she is too young, so he gives in to baser desires and marries the shallow, manipulative Princess Helene (Anita Ekberg). The marriage ends when Pierre discovers his wife's true nature. Andrei is captured and later released by the French, and returns home only to watch his wife die in childbirth. A few months later, Pierre and Andrei meet again. Andrei sees Natasha and falls in love, but his father will only permit the marriage if ...

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Plot Keywords:

french invasion of russia | year 1812 | tsarist russia | french | soldier | 

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Taglines:

"BRILLIANT!"--New York Times

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Genres:

Drama | Romance | War

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Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG for violence

Details

Country:

USA Italy

Language:

English Italian Russian

Release Date:

21 August 1956 (USA)

Also Known As:

Krieg und Frieden

Filming Locations:

Cinecittà Studios, Cinecittà, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Box Office

Budget:

$6,000,000 (estimated)

Gross USA:

$12,500,000

Company Credits

Production Co:

Ponti-De Laurentiis Cinematografica

Technical Specs

Runtime:

208 min

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording) Perspecta Stereo (as Perspecta Stereophonic Sound ® by Suonitalia Studio - Rome -)

Color:

Color (Technicolor) (as Technicolor®)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

King Vidor directed the huge Battle of Borodino sequence rather than leave it to a second unit director as was the custom.

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Goofs

In the first battle, Prince Andrei dismounts to take the flag of the shot soldier who is holding it. Then the wounded soldier kneels twice.

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Quotes

Natasha Rostov: Nicholas.
Nicholas Rostov: Yes?
Natasha Rostov: The expression on my face.
Nicholas Rostov: What about it?
Natasha Rostov: Do I look disdainful?
Nicholas Rostov: No!
Natasha Rostov: You're impossible! I'm sure I look disdainful.
Nicholas Rostov: Well, what do you want to look disdainful for?
Natasha Rostov: Well, I thought if I looked bored and disdainful nobody would notice that this is the first ball I've ever been to... How's this? Better?
Nicholas Rostov: Oh, that's much better.
[...]

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Crazy Credits

Closing credits epilogue: The most difficult thing - but an essential one - is to love Life, to love it even while one suffers, because Life is all. Life is God, and to love Life means to love God. Tolstoy "WAR and PEACE"

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Alternate Versions

Two different versions of the main titles exists. Both of them in English. In the one, the credits are set against a neutral background, in the other against details of a painting of Napoleon in front of his troops.

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Connections

Featured in The Men Who Made the Movies: King Vidor (1973)

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Soundtracks

Masquerade Waltz
(uncredited)
Written by Aram Khachaturyan (as Aram Khachaturian)
Natasha's and Andrei dance

User Reviews

"You can't hate something you don't know"

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.