WAR AND PEACE Special Event

Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace (Viona I Mir), in its original, complete, non-dubbed 403 minute widescreen version, may be, at least among serious American critics, one of the most curiously misunderstood and underrated of all the great epic films. (And a great epic it is-as much as Intolerance, Andrei Roublev, or The Seven Samurai.) Based on the novel commonly considered the best in all world literature- Leo Tolstoy’s massive 19th-century historical saga of Russia during the Napo I eon ic Wars-writer-di rector-star Bondarchuk’s film, given unprecedented carte blanche by the Soviet government, is a staggering logistical feat: 158 scenes, 272 sets, 8,000 costumes, 30 principal roles, over 120,000 extras, a budget near $100 million (in the pre-Schwarzenegger days when such expenditures were unknown), over 100 locations all over Russia (from palace ballrooms to country hovels to Moscow streets), a massive 6 1/2 hour running time that, in the U.S.S.R., was spread over four nights. Overshadowing almost everything else is an astounding recreation of the Battle of Borodino, meticulously researched and roaringly staged, that consumes almost an hour of screen time and is, beyond question, the most exciting and elaborate of all movie battle scenes. But it’s not just the scale and ambition of War and Peace that are remarkable. Audiences who know only the dubbed, cut version which circulated in the U.S in 1968 (and won that year’s foreign language film Oscar) don’t really know the movie. They’ve missed the robust acting-especially by principals Ludmilla Savelyeva (Nathan Roistova), Vyacheslav Tikhonov (Prince Andrei Bolkonsky), and Bondarchuk himself (as Pierre Bezukhov). They’ve also missed at least some of the experimentalism and verve of the camerawork-planned by a direcc:.JII ?=– tor obviously aware of many of the ’60s “New Wave” currents in Soviet Bloc and European films-and the balance: the grand, spacious rhythm, the magisterial flow of the storytelling. Nothing is over-reverent or stilted about the style of War and Peace. As much as a masterpiece of world literature, Bondarchuk approached the film as if it were a huge, torridly romantic, wildly picturesque, compulsively readable bestseller: another Gone With the Wind, Ben Hur, or The Godfather. Spectacle, romance, grand sweep, violent action, lusty acting, an extravagantly happy ending, and a cast of a hundred thousand … somehow, at the height of the Communist Empire, the old U.S.S.R. produced a show that may be the superHollywood movie of all time. Ironically, Hollywood-and the rest of America-never saw the film, but only its dubbed, shortened shadow.-Critic’s Choice, Michael Wilmington, The Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington will introduce the film.