One of the worst movies I've ever seen

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Anyone who has read, as I read, the entire book "War and Peace", has a clear idea of ​​the enormous work that must have done to make this film. Its probably one of the most complex war dramas ever written and the largest dramatic book I have ever read. It's not my bedside book, but it's certainly one of my favorites when it comes to Russian literature. Directed by King Vidor (who transformed this film into his greatest masterpiece), he has Audrey Hepburn (in the role of Natasha), Henry Fonda (as Pierre) and Mel Ferrer (as Prince Andrei).The script is very faithful to the book and seeks to make a legitimate adaptation. However, its very slow, giving too much emphasis and spending too much time on certain scenes without need, and it lacks emotions and strength, being unable to thrill or grab our attention. Perhaps the complexity of the original material has caused so many difficulties for the writing team that they have not been able to handle it in the best way. As for the actors, I liked Audrey Hepburn, she knew how to give life and joy to her character, but I expected more from Mel Ferrer, he did not understand his character. I hated Henry Fonda... he had one of the most psychologically rich characters in the novel and simply was unable to deal with it. It was a clear casting error.The film has excellent war scenes and portrays very well the armies but always without emotion or danger, in a very warm manner. The costumes and scenarios fill my expectations and have taken great attention with detail and realism, which is quite pleasant. Cinematography is quite pleasant, although it exaggerates in brightness sometimes. Nino Rota is responsible for the soundtrack and did a good job. Anyway, as this movie has the worst sound effects I've heard in movies, I will not criticize the soundtrack.

If you want to bring such an vast, sweeping yet intensely human novel such as Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace to the screen with both its breadth and depth intact you can do either one of two of things. You can film it page-for-page, and make an eight-hour behemoth, as Sergei Bondarchuk did with the 1960s Russian production. Or, you can prune it down to something more manageable, excising whole characters and subplots, but recreating certain sections of Tolstoy's work more or less verbatim to preserve what is vital about his work. This latter is the approach taken for Dino de Laurentiis's 1956 Italian-American co-production.The narrative here focuses mainly on just three of Tolstoy's characters – Pierre, Natasha and Alexei – portrayed by Henry Fonda, Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer respectively. Fonda is really too old to play the youthful Pierre, but he is not as severely miscast as some have said, pulling off the early scenes of Pierre as the gangly, drunken student with a fair degree of believability. Hepburn brilliantly handles the aging of her character, transforming the naïve teenager into a mature and confident woman while still maintaining the same core persona. If only something as complementary could be said of Mel Ferrer, who takes to acting the same way anvils take to floating. His appallingness is matched only by the woman who plays his wife, Milly Vitale. There are some decent supporting players though. Herbert Lom gives a surprisingly heartfelt performance as Napoleon. Oskar Homolka brilliantly plays the archetypal scruffy old general who's too high-ranking and experienced to bother with all that decorum business, his gestures forceful but with a half-hearted brevity to them. And John Mills is bizarrely like someone out of a Monty Python film.Director King Vidor was a veteran of old Hollywood and just the sort of director to handle the mix of big canvas and intimacy. He shows what must have been extraordinary patience in setting up hordes of extras, carts and cannons for authentic looking crowd scenes, but then makes them a briefly glimpsed backdrop, never really dwelling on the massive scope or showing it off for its own sake. This seemingly contradictory tack gives us a sense of the story happening in a real place, but never allows it to detract from the main players and their stories. Vidor is constantly implying things with the simplest of cinematic tricks, and this helps to make up for the gaps in plot that the adaptation necessitates. For example, when Hepburn and Vittorio Gassman kiss at the opera, the angle gradually changes to reveal the reflection of a door in a mirror. This subtle move plants the idea in our heads that someone may walk in on them, and it gives the moment a sense of unease and wrongness. Vidor's canny ability to suggest mood and temperament, particularly evident in his framing of the inner monologues during the dance scene, also helps to cover any deficit in the acting.At three-and-a-half hours, this is still quite a long old movie. And yet, thanks to some compelling imagery and strong narrative it moves faster than many a 90-minuter. Shorn of much of Tolstoy's original material as it is, it is still long enough to give us that feeling of the passage of time and development of character, to make Fonda's transition from a foppish lad in Western European attire to a bearded man in Russian garb feel like more than just a change of clothes. This version of War and Peace certainly has a fair few things wrong with it, yet still manages to be a lucid and passionate – if not entirely faithful – adaptation of a great work of literature.

Mammoth adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's huge novel. I never read the book so I can't say how it compares but, on its own terms, is a good epic movie. It deals with Napoleon (Herbert Lom) and his troops invading Russia and how it affects two families. Let's get the bad things out of the way--at 3 1/2 hours it's far too long (the last half hour really drags); characters and stories are not handled well at all--people come and go very quickly; there's some funny post-dubbing (notice how Audrey Hepburn's voice echoes--when she's outside!); Henry Fonda gives a rare bad performance and notice how almost all the Russians have British accents! But the good vastly outnumbers the bad.It's never really dull and is beautifully filmed in color with incredible sets and costumes. Save for Henry Fonda all the acting is good. Also this has an incredibly attractive cast--Hepburn, May Britt and Anita Ekberg are gorgeous; Mel Ferrer, Jeremy Brett and Vittorio Gassman are VERY handsome. The story moves rather quickly and has quite a few truly epic sequences--an absolutely gorgeous ballroom dance; battles between Russia and France; the mass exodus from Moscow and the long French march out of Russia. It's also fun to see Herbert Lom chew the scenery and there's a beautiful music score. It's really worth seeing for the production values alone. Recommended despite the length.

OF COURSE, I slept through it. It was long and boring and one needed the drug of sleep to endure the stagey direction and acting.Audrey Hepburn was at her beautiful, charming, irritating, over-acting best in this film. It was only her personal charm and loveliness that kept her from making me sick with fakeness.The scene where Pierre tells her he's getting married, her head turns so fast I'm surprised it didn't break her lovely neck. People in real life don't act that way because they'd risk physical injury if they did.Henry: I'm getting married. What's wrong? Audrey: I hope you're happy with your new wife but I just broke my neck.Obviously she was trying to convey the enthusiasm and energy of youth so that we could see the change to her character resulting from war, experience and time but her enthusiasm was stagey and irritating. She was so damn happy to see everyone in this film I'm surprised they didn't smack her.Henry Fonda was less fake but he had his moments, too. At his father's death scene when he falls to one knee, I'm surprised he didn't injure himself. They must have put padding on the floor.Henry: My father..is dead...and my knee...is broken...Many other examples from Ferrer and minor characters.King Vidor apparently never heard of film minimalism.Henry was supposed to be clumsy, I guess, and he bumped into a few walls and tripped over a log but he certainly could have been funnier. He had some charm early on but he missed a lot of opportunities for humor.I found it funny when he stepped forward to be shot without waiting for orders. They could have had a guard put a hand on his elbow to guide him forward then have the commander stop the guard. Instead, Henry moves forward to the firing post of his own volition to be stopped by destiny. Funny.You hear a lot about conflict between actors and directors on the set but Audrey and Henry are good actors and I'm surprised they let this stuff go without saying "Isn't this going to look a little stupid?" I guess Henry really DID need the money.I've never had the energy or time to read the book and I hoped that this film might enlighten me a bit but...I slept through it.If you're tired and want to see a really GOOD movie that encourages sleep, I recommend "2001: A Space Odyssey". It's a beautiful movie but the scenes and visuals are so slow you'd better bring a large cappuccino.