War and Peace (Sergey Bondarchuk, 1966)

Pierre Bezukhov: Sergey Bondarchuk
Natasha Rostova: Lyudmila Saveleva
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky: Vyacheslav Tikhonov
Field Marshal Kutuzov: Boris Zakhava
Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky: Anatoli Ktorov
Princess Maria Bolkonsky: Antonina Shuranova
Count Ilya Andreyevich Rostov: Viktor Stanitsyn
Countess Natalya Rostova: Kira Golovko
Nikolai Rostov: Oleg Tabakov
Petya Rostov: Sergei Yermilov
Hélène Kuragin: Irina Skobtseva
Anatol Kuragin: Vasili Lanovoy
Napoleon Bonaparte: Vladislav Strzhelchik

Director: Sergey Bondarchuk
Screenplay: Sergey Bondarchuk, Vasiliy Solovyov
Based on a novel by Leo Tolstoy
Cinematography: Yu-Lan Chen, Anatoliy Petritskiy, Alexsandr Shelenkov
Production design: Mikhail Bogdanov, Aleksandr Dikhtyar, Said Menyalshchikov, Gennady Myasnikov
Film editing: Tatyana Likachyova
Music: Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov

No film adaptation of a great novel is going to satisfy admirers of that novel. The best we can hope for is a work that stands on its own, that supplies cinematic equivalents for some of the achievements of the prose work. But War and Peace, with its epic battles and accounts of the social lives and romantic entanglements of 19th-century Russians, cries out for filming on the grand and glamorous scale. And few films have assumed a grander scale than Sergey Bondarchuk's seven-hour-long version of Tolstoy's novel. I saw it in a theater in Dallas, where it was shown in four installments, sometime in the early 1970s and have never quite forgotten it, particularly those moments when the camera soared away from the heat of the battle into what seemed like the high heavens, or when it sailed above the dancers at Natasha's first ball. But I've read the novel several times, the latest reading a couple of months ago, and the best I can say, watching Bondarchuk's film again, is that his version is a magnificent failure. We get great gulps of the source material, sometimes in voiceover narration, and the performers are apt embodiments of the characters I see in my mind's eye as I read the book. But no film can capture the interiority of the novel, the psychological insights that make Prince Andrei, Natasha, and especially Pierre into people we feel like we know. Bondarchuk tries to supply some of this with voiceovers in which the characters speak their inner thoughts, but only succeeds in blurring the focus: The voiceovers are distractions from the drama that should be unfolding through action and dialogue. That said, watching the film over four successive nights is a unique experience.

Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Sergey Bondarchuk in War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky

The longest of the four parts of War and Peace, Andrei Bolkonsky is the expository vehicle, introducing the three major characters, though it gives the lion's share of exposition to the two men, Andrei and Pierre. Natasha, still a little girl, virtually bursts into the film when she flings open a door in a brilliant flash of light, but the narrative concentration is on the youthful indecision of Pierre and on Andrei's unhappy marriage. Why he's so unhappy with the pretty, pregnant Lise is never made clear in the film -- and not much clearer in the book, other than that he's a man who hasn't found a direction in his life. Neither has Pierre, to be sure. He's still spending his time with boisterous companions. Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Bondarchuk are too old to be playing these characters -- Tikhonov was in his late 30s and Bondarchuk in his mid-40s -- but the war and the death of Andrei's wife allow Tikhonov to assume maturity swiftly, whereas Bondarchuk is stuck playing the naïf, railroaded into marriage with Hélène and later into a foolish duel with Dolokhov.

Part II: Natasha Rostova

Lyudmila Saveleva and Vyacheslav Tikhonov in War and Peace, Part II: Natasha Rostova

Lyudmila Saveleva is an exquisite Natasha, but I think Bondarchuk does the character a disservice by not allowing her more time to fall into the clutches of Kuragin. Tolstoy's novel delineates the gradual stages of Kuragin's seduction and Natasha's yielding to him. It also makes more clear that Kuragin really does fall in love with her -- as who wouldn't? The ball is the spectacular set piece of the installment, and the camera dances along with the people. Andrei's father is of course the real villain of the story, and I wish we had more of the torture he inflicts on his daughter, Maria, and on her retreat into religion to bolster the depiction of the old man's cruelty. But as Bondarchuk has chosen to eliminate the very interesting (but not essential) story of Nikolai Rostov's throwing over his cousin Sonya for Maria, there doesn't really need to be much development of the character. Too bad, because Antonina Shuranova does a fine job with what's left of Maria in the film -- like Tolstoy's Maria, she really does have beautiful eyes, but unlike her, she could never be considered "ugly." Bondarchuk has also cut, perhaps wisely, Pierre's involvement with the Freemasons, which takes up many of the less interesting pages of Tolstoy's book.

Part III: The Year 1812

Sergey Bondarchuk in War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

There are no more spectacular battle scenes than the ones in this film, and probably never will be, even now that we have CGI to supplant the thousands of extras and borrowed Soviet soldiers that Bondarchuk employed for the film. I think the thunder and carnage of war is made more impressive by the presence of Pierre, immaculately garbed, with a white top hat, absurdly stumbling around as the soldiers go about their terrible business. As the narrator puts it, "On June 12, the forces of Western Europe crossed the frontiers of Russia and war began. In other words, an event took place that was contrary to all human reason and human nature." Bondarchuk pulls out all stops in proclaiming the love of Mother Russia that animates the soldiers, but when the icon of the Holy Mother of Smolensk is brought out for mass adoration, I was ironically reminded of the scene in Sergei Eisenstein's The Old and the New (1929) in which a procession of Orthodox clergy comes out to pray for rain and is mocked by cuts to images of bleating sheep. Clearly, much had changed in the treatment of religion in the Soviet Union by the time Bondarchuk made War and Peace. This part does end on a rather heavy-handed patriotic sermon, which I suspect may have been inserted to placate the censors.

Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

There is something rushed and jumbled about the concluding part of Bondarchuk's epic, which is forced to wind up the stories of Andrei and Natasha as well as concentrate on the burning of Moscow, the retreat of the French, and Pierre's imprisonment and release. This leaves little time for Tolstoy's epilogue, in which Pierre and Natasha wed and start a family, as do the mostly absent Nikolai and Maria. The coincidence of Pierre's rescue and Petya's death feels particularly rushed: I wonder if anyone who hasn't read the book recently will even be able to follow the action. But we are also spared much of the interaction of Pierre and Platon Karataev (Mikhail Khrabrov), one of Tolstoy's founts of peasant wisdom, which even on the page tends toward mawkish sentimentality. There are still some enormously effective scenes. The burning of Moscow puts the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) to shame -- which may have been Bondarchuk's intent. The execution of prisoners by the French is movingly staged, as is the fate of the retreating French soldiers, summed up on one last spectacular overhead shot as the ragged and freezing French stream toward a huge circle around the fire.