Watch War and Peace: The Splendid, Epic Film Adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Grand Novel (1969)

War_and_Peace_poster,_1967

There’s an old axiom that mediocre books make great movies and great books make for lousy movies. Mario Puzo’s best­seller The God­fa­ther is a straight­for­ward pot­boil­er but Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la spun it into one of the best films ever made. In con­trast, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gats­by has beguiled mul­ti­ple ambi­tious, mis­guid­ed film­mak­ers into mak­ing cin­e­mat­ic duds.

Hollywood’s 1956 adap­ta­tion of Leo Tolstoy’s famous­ly mas­sive tome War and Peace proved that axiom to be true. Direc­tor King Vidor, who gen­er­al­ly speak­ing is no slouch when it comes to direct­ing epics, just couldn’t trans­late the novel’s sweep and depth. More­over, the film’s leads, Audrey Hep­burn and Hen­ry Fon­da, just seemed mis­cast. New York Times crit­ic Bosley Crowther described the movie as “odd­ly mechan­i­cal and emo­tion­al­ly ster­ile.”

The movie was also an affront to Russ­ian nation­al­ism. After all, Tolstoy’s nov­el is not just anoth­er his­tor­i­cal epic; it is a cul­tur­al lode­stone for what is “Russ­ian-ness.” It is, as Rose­mary Edmonds, a trans­la­tor of the 1963 edi­tion of the book called, the “Ili­ad and the Odyssey of Rus­sia.” The Sovi­et film indus­try couldn’t let some half-baked Hol­ly­wood flick end up being the sole cin­e­mat­ic adap­ta­tion of the book. Mak­ing an adap­ta­tion was, as a bunch of Sovi­et film­mak­ers wrote in an open let­ter, “a mat­ter of hon­or for the Sovi­et cin­e­ma indus­try.”

After decades of mak­ing stol­id pro­pa­gan­da pieces that more often than not involved trac­tors, the Sovi­et film indus­try was fired up to make a work that was faith­ful to Tol­stoy and yet have artis­tic mer­it as a movie – a tall order. As the direc­tor and star of the Russ­ian ver­sion of War and Peace, Sergei Bon­darchuk, put it: “Our duty is to intro­duce the future view­er to the ori­gins of sub­lime art, to make the inner­most mys­ter­ies of the nov­el, War and Peace, visu­al­ly tan­gi­ble, to inform a feel­ing of full­ness of life, of the joy of human expe­ri­ence.”

The Sovi­et gov­ern­ment mar­shaled a stag­ger­ing amount of effort and expense to real­ize this film. Nev­er under­es­ti­mate the will of a total­i­tar­i­an dic­ta­tor­ship with an axe to grind. Pro­duc­tion start­ed in 1961 and last­ed six years. More than forty dif­fer­ent muse­ums con­tributed cos­tumes and set dress­ing to the pro­duc­tion, includ­ing things like chan­de­liers, sil­ver­ware and fur­ni­ture. The Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture con­tributed 900 hors­es. The Red Army had 12,000 troops play as extras dur­ing the cli­mac­tic Bat­tle of Borodi­no sequence. Bon­darchuk suf­fered two near-fatal heart attacks dur­ing pro­duc­tion.

All that mon­ey and effort paid off. The result­ing movie was one of the most lav­ish, spec­tac­u­lar films ever made. And at 451 min­utes, it’s also one of the longest. (It was released in the USSR as four sep­a­rate movies.)

Along the way, Bon­darchuk pulled off the impos­si­ble – the movie is actu­al­ly good, mir­ror­ing the breadth and depth of the nov­el. War and Peace won all sorts of awards includ­ing an Oscar for Best For­eign lan­guage movie. As a young Roger Ebert raved back in 1969:

“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.

You can watch the film above, thanks to Mos­film. It comes com­plete with sub­ti­tles.

Bon­darchuk’s War and Peace, which you can also pur­chase online, is list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

Vin­tage Footage of Leo Tol­stoy: Video Cap­tures the Great Nov­el­ist Dur­ing His Final Days

The Com­plete Works of Leo Tol­stoy Online: New Archive Will Present 90 Vol­umes for Free (in Russ­ian)

Leo Tolstoy’s Fam­i­ly Recipe for Mac­a­roni and Cheese

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.


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Comments (6)
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  • adieu fb15tors2@gmail.com says:

    la poli­tique est une mère qui a tuer son fils au nom de la poli­tique plusieurs crimes de guer­res on étaient com­mis­es plusieurs rich­es sont dev­enue pau­vres plusieurs his­toires d’amoures ont échouaient plusieurs hon­nêtes gents sont hum­i­li­er plusieurs pays sont déchirés par la fin ors­ent que tous le monde veut gar­ent ire l’avenir de ces enfants enfin dieu nous a pas cray­er pour avoir de bonne rela­tion et de s’aimaient

  • A says:

    there’s no sub­ti­tles unfor­tu­nate­ly

  • Kelly says:

    There ARE NO SUBTITLES!!!!

  • adieu fb15tors2@gmail.com says:

    seule­ment. il voulais que on s’accroche les uns au autres pour con­naitre la valeur de notre vie sur terre et pren­dre soins des deux et toute est pos­si­ble et quand en veut on peut et ce n’est jamais la guerre qui ressoud­eras nos prob­lèmes ces bien la pais en utilisent l’amoure et la con­science et on doit ce dire com­ment les gens prendraient t’ils notre mort quelle seras notre répu­ta­tion quoique nous soyons muselle­ments c retiens ou bien juives hommes ou femmes rich­es ou pau­vres même chose pour la dif­férence de couleurs la per­fec­tion est impos­si­bles mais en peut tou­jours essay­er et il ya tou­jours de l’espoir quand en veut bien faire et comme il se dit le hasard fait bien des choses il suff­is que nous ayons tous un bon grand ceaur.

  • mark says:

    Youtube links are bro­ken

  • Steven says:

    None of the links in this thread, with or with­out sub­ti­tles, work. They are all bro­ken or page not found. Is ‘openculture.com’ some kind of hoax??

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