War and Peace movie review & film summary (1969)
Like Westerns and gangster movies, epics were almost always made by Hollywood. What other nation had the means to spend $44,000,000 on "Cleopatra" -- even if it was a flop? What happened, though, was that "Cleopatra" brought an end to the epic budget race. If you couldn't make it for $11,000,000 ("Spartacus") or $14,000,000 ("2001: A Space Odyssey") or even $19,000,000 ("Dr. Dolittle"), then perhaps you shouldn't make it at all.
For this reason, among many others, the Russian version of "War and Peace" is a magnificently unique film. Money isn't everything, but you can't make an epic without it. And "War and Peace" is the definitive epic of all time. It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and -- yes -- splendid movie. Perhaps that's just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph.
By now the statistics regarding "War and Peace" are well known, but forgive me if I recite them with a certain relish anyway: the film was five years in the making at a cost of $100,000,000, with a cast of 120,000, all clothed in authentic uniforms, and the Red Army was mobilized to recreate Napoleon's battles exactly (it is claimed) as they happened.
The prestige of the Soviet film industry rested on "War and Peace" for half a decade, and the result looks like it. You are never, ever, going to see anything to equal it. Indeed, because of the need to schedule the film in two segments of three hours each, you may never even see it unless you go during the current four-week run at the Esquire. It is difficult to imagine this massive, six-hour film playing neighborhood theaters or turning up on the late show.
It is easy enough to praise director Sergei Bondarchuk for his thundering battle scenes, or his delicate ballroom scenes, or the quality of his actors. But these were almost to be expected. What is extraordinary about "War and Peace" is that Bondarchuk was able to take the enormous bulk of Leo Tolstoy's novel and somehow transform it into this great chunk of film without losing control along the way. The trouble with a lot of long epic films is that the makers can't keep everything in hand. Many a film is smothered by its own production. An example: Samuel Bronston's "The Fall of the Roman Empire," a dreadfully expensive, chaotic production that eventually resulted in the fall of Bronston's own empire.
