If youâve never found yourself intoning the old-fogey expression, âThey donât make âem like they used to,â hereâs your big (and I mean big) chance. Soviet director Sergei Bondarchukâs gargantuan late-â60s adaptation of Leo Tolstoyâs monumental War and Peace, newly restored and spanning seven hours (plus breaks), commandeers the Castro on Saturday, May 25. Donât fret that you wonât be able to finish the novel by the weekend, comrade. Thatâs why God gave us the movies.
In Bondarchukâs case, God took the form of a massive budget and a magic wand courtesy of the stateâs top brass. The army supplied thousands of extras, while museums were instructed to provide every artifact that the production requested. (Cecil B. DeMille and Erich von Stroheim, those notoriously ambitious architects and purveyors of historical eventsâand, occasionally, historical accuracyâonscreen, are still spinning with envy in their graves at the resources granted to Bondarchuk.)
Still from Sergei Bondarchuk’s ‘War and Peace,’ 1966. (Courtesy of Janus Films)
Over the course of four-plus years, the director deployed his riches with an imagination that matched his power. Although a veteran actor (he cast himself as Pierre), Bondarchuk had helmed only one feature before he was given the commission in 1961 to make War and Peace. Yet he refused to play it safe, using every cinematic technique, including eye-of-God helicopter shots, split-screens and handheld camerawork, that thrust the viewer into the maelstrom of warâand the desires and confusion of the heart.
Size has always mattered when it comes to epics, and no movie proves the point better than the four-part War and Peace. Criterion is readying a DVD for June release, but whose TV comes anywhere close to the Castro screen? In this case, bigger is better.
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