Cinema: Thud & Blunder

Taras Bulba. There are 10,000 magnificent Argentine horses in this picture, and the thing to do is look at them. If possible, don't look at anything else. Above all, don't look at:

1) The screen credits—they insist that all this thud-and-blunder, which cost $7,000,000 to make and takes two hours to sit through, is a serious cinemadaptation of Nikolai Gogol's classic tale of the Zaporogue Cossacks.

2) The actors—Yul Brynner, who plays a great big brute of a Cossack chieftain, rides like a man Scotch-taped to his saddle; Tony Curtis, who plays his son, has an accent that will pass as Russian when...