1956 - WAR AND PEACE, King Vidor's film of Tolstoy's novel on a very epic scale.

One of those big 1950's epic films.  Photographed in Italy for the most part and featuring a cast made up of Italian and American actors.  The producer Dino De Laurentiis as they liked to say in the film's advertising "spared no expense."

Apparently six credited screen writers were involved with the director King Vidor also doing rewrites during production.  England's top color cameraman Jack Cardiff was responsible for the photography of the film. For the time supposedly 18,000 Italian troops were hired to re-stage the battle scenes, primarily the famous Battle of Bordino.  Director King Vidor had handled complex productions in the past, The Big Parade, Hallelujah and Duel in the Sun with out losing sight of the personal stories of the characters but this film might have gotten away from him in this instance.

If the film had problems it was in the mixed cast.  Henry Fonda was all wrong as the pivotal character, Pierre Bezukhov, his American Midwestern affectations seem completely out of place for a film set in Russia.  Audrey Hepburn who was cast as Natasha Rostova at least looks the part of a Russian Countess.  However Hepburn insisted at the time that her husband Mel Ferrer play Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and he's kind of hopeless.

How's the film?  Well it's long, the color photography is good.  The sets are on a massive scale.  The battle scenes are well staged as is the burning of Moscow.  Frankly the mixed cast of Italian, British and American actors is kind of jarring at times. There is a lot of dubbing that had to occur to get everyone speaking in the same language, in this case English.  The sound has kind of a hollow reverb quality to it which can get fairly distracting.

 

This version of War and Peace is usually compared to the 1967 Russian version. But I think that this is a little unfair.  The two films were made at different time periods and are really two different interpretations of the same story.

 

Here we go, the film was written by Bridget Boland, Mario Camerini, Ennio De  Concini, Gian Gaspare Napolitano, Ivo Perilli, Mario Soldati, King Vidor and Robert Westerby.  The uncredited writers were, Jean Aurenche, Pierre Bost, Sergio Amidei and supposedly Irwin Shaw and King Vidor's wife Florence Vidor.  The film is 208 minutes.