(3 of 3)
Of the film's three stars, only Audrey Hepburn, with her precocious child's head set upon a swanlike neck, looks the part. She is perfectly the Natasha described by Tolstoy: "A dark-eyed little girl, plain, but full of life, with her wide mouth, her childish bare shoulders ... her black lair brushed back, her slender arms . . ." In her playing, Audrey catches the gamine qualities of Natasha, and her softness. What is lacking is the steely courage that would let Natasha brand her flesh with a red-hot iron to prove her love. Instead of a total commitment to life, there is more often a quiet acceptance of fate. Mel Ferrer's Prince Andrey has a certain sullen grandeur, but his diction is often unclear, and he is more wooden than reserved, more testy than proud. Henry Fonda's leanness at first seems all wrong for the massive, moonfaced, soul-tortured Pierre. But Fonda builds beautifully into his part, using a physical clumsiness as a counterpoise to his soaring spirit, making his rages seem the more terrible since they flash out from passivity. As he struggles for the answers to the great questions (Why does a man live? Why does he kill? Who owns his loyalty?), Fonda acts to the very limit of his considerable powers, and sometimes gives the impression of being the only man in the huge cast who has read the book.