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Yet the film, as a film, is one of the industry's best. Visually, it could scarcely be improved. The Technicolor camera sweeps through Palladian palaces and country estates and catches pleasant fragments of the earthly paradise inhabited by Russia's landed gentry—the balls and hunts, the troika races and officers' revels. The duel between Pierre and Dolokhov is fought in a dawnlit forest where snow and awakening sky gleam with as many frosty gradations of white as a pearl fresh from the sea. When Pierre, a civilian at the front, hears the opening guns of the bloody concert at Borodino, he runs awkwardly along a hillside, trying to peer ahead through a tangle of shrubbery until at last he stops breathless on a vantage point. The camera becomes his dazzled eye as it reveals spread out before him the Russian lines and advanced batteries, then a wide, uptilted lift of plain, and finally, in the distance, the massed columns of the French moving into position with, beyond them, still more columns suggested by the exploding flashes of sun light on bayonets. Director King Vidor has a master's hand with the steady, drumbeat assault of infantry battalions and the wild, wind-whipped charge of cavalry. He is even better in tracing the terrible retreat of Napoleon's Grande Armee from Moscow as it drowns in mud, freezes stiff in blizzards, and curls like a dying snake across a winter landscape as desolate as the ninth ring of Hell.
But Director Vidor, unfortunately, must also deal with an involved story covering many lives and stretching across many years. Twenty hours of film would not be enough to do Tolstoy justice, and Vidor has less than four. The inevitable result is a telescoping of scenes and a hopscotching through the plot that scat ters attention from one leading character to another. The cast speaks in discordant accents, ranging from Cockney to Italian to Middle European to Middlewestern, and some of the most complex of Toltoy's people can only be hinted at: Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) is a gutural swashbuckler; the eternal peasant, 'laton (John Mills), has time only for
few maxims (sample: "Where there is aw there is injustice") and then dies; he Machiavellian Prince Vassily (Tullio Jarminati) scarcely gets out of the wings, and the two men struggling for possession of Holy Russia, Kutuzov (Oscar Homolka) and Napoleon (Herbert Lorn), are seen simply as eccentrics—the one, an untidy, drowsy general; the other, a preening peacock who imagines he is an :agle.