War & Peace: An Epic of Soviet Cinema

It’s hard to do cin­e­mat­ic jus­tice to any good nov­el, let alone the great­est of Rus­si­a’s many great nov­els, Leo Tol­stoy’s War & Peace. But Sovi­et direc­tor Sergei Bon­darchuk some­how man­aged to pull it off. Review­ing Bon­darchuk’s film back in 1969, a young Roger Ebert wrote:

“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.

No cor­ners were cut, and no expens­es spared, in mak­ing the film. Indeed, the film (avail­able on DVD here) was made “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.” What’s more, 35,000 cos­tumes were made for the pro­duc­tion, and many Sovi­et muse­ums con­tributed arti­facts for the pro­duc­tion design. That’s stag­ger­ing, even by today’s stan­dards.

Released in four parts between 1965 and 1967, the Acad­e­my Award-win­ning film runs more than sev­en hours and you can now find it play­ing on YouTube. You can watch Part 1 here, and here you have Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4. And if you need sub­ti­tles, click CC at the bot­tom of the videos. The film is, of course, list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Thanks Ammar for the heads up on this film!