On Screen

...Only occasionally does the resultant beauty justify such extravagance...

...This is where literalness pays off: If the Battle of Borodino was fought by 120,000 men, the film employs exactly that many...

...Nevertheless, the many battle sequences offer numerous moments that are—there is no other word for it—epic...

...with great frequency and doggedness, the camera goes poking around the sky as if stalking the Almighty...

...and there is an often repeated, protracted shot of a river from a fast, low-flying plane that follows its course...

...IN Therese and Isabelle, based on what must be an ineffably dreary autobiographical novel by Violette Leduc, the middle-aged Therese returns to the boarding school, a converted chateau, in which she had a brief but passionate love affair with a schoolmate, Isabelle...

...Essy Persson has an ugly face, squat body, unsightly bosom, bad legs, stubby fingers and no acting ability...

...And the film was cut down to six hours and 13 minutes, about an hour shorter than the Russian version—itself a boiling down of the novel...

...Though "War," where there is a minimum of dialogue, has life to it, "Peace" emerges marmoreal and ponderous, with actors sitting like so many patiences on a monument...

...The effect is to make the fighting unreal, not by legitimately increasing its fierceness, but rather by imposing a schematic, poeticizing orderliness on it, a discernible would-be lyrical methodology that actually kills the poetry of horror...

...There are exceptions: Though the part of Princess Maria has the rather limited range from tearfulness to uncontrollable sobbing, Antonina Shuranova brings it to a magnificently eloquent face and great dignity...

...Exactly how much has been lost by the cutting of the American version I cannot say, though such incidents as Pierre's divorce and his liberation from French captivity did not sufficiently register on me...

...I suspect that even in Russian most of these performances are wooden...

...I say "somewhat" because the official idea of fulfillment is just as naive on fabled Nevsky Prospect as on fabulous Hollywood Boulevard...

...The actors, or, at any rate, those uneasy centaurs with Russian exteriors and Anglo-American insides, come across as horrendous bores...

...The music by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov is hopelessly banal, on a par with what Hollywood lavishes on its spectaculars, give or take a demiquaver...

...Gigantism finally reaps its hard-earned, exhausting, yet undeniable rewards...

...The very idea of dubbing a film with serious artistic intentions is profoundly misguided...

...The official brochure invokes a comparison with Madchen in Uniform, but in its vulgarity the film is more of a Madchen in Cunniform, and in its antiquity a Madchen in Cuneiform...

...Here is a case of acute dissociation of sensibility: While the soundtrack groans with the overripe sex prose of the authoress, a cross between Jean Genet and Faith Baldwin and a heavy one to bear, the screen shows two naked females languidly lolling about, or, if they are doing anything, doing it reflected in a bulbous, distorting vase or hidden by some interposed object...

...and modest acting talents...

...and, save for its length and some action footage, War and Peace is no exception...

...The leads, however, fall short of expectation...

...To be sure, there are suggestions of cunnilingus, soixante-neuf, as well as the longest and clumsiest masturbation scene on film—to which poor Georges Auric has composed dutifully dreadful cunnilingus and masturbation music...

...But I am willing to make exceptions for what might oxymoronically be called subtle or graceful bulk, as in Proust or Gaston Lachaise, "The Massacre of Chios" or "Das Lied von der Erde," The Faerie Queene or Don Quixote...

...in this case, while the dubbing is technically fair, the Babel of tongues ranges all the way from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to the Neighborhood Playhouse, without a distinguished vocal performance in the lot of them...

...As Natasha, Ludmila Savel-yeva looks agreeable from some angles and pudgily babyish from others...

...thus there is a shot of an Imperial Ball from what must be the highest crane ever built —almost a helicopter—that gives you the feeling that the very stars are looking in on the dance...

...As a director, Bondarchuk is, with one or two exceptions, unable to make the "Peace" scenes come alive, despite his use of almost every available cinematic technique...

...Vyacheslav Ti-honov, as Andrei, has an extremely suggestive face, but he likes to keep it looking dashingly morose, except when he has it look morosely dashing...

...The worst acting comes from Anatoly Ktorov, who makes old Prince Bolkonsky into a petty tyrant, and Irina Skob-tseva, who turns Helene into a large cow...

...As Therese (Essy Persson of I, a Woman) wanders around the empty school closed for summer vacation, and sees her face reflected in the water of a familiar toilet bowl, voices, figures, her former self—the whole past comes to life...

...But after the adapters, dubbers, and American cutters have taken their toll, only stoy is left...

...There is...

...A veritable legion of process shots obtrudes on the battle action: Sometimes it is one army advancing in one direction superimposed on another advancing in the opposite...

...it is simply the trappings and the way of achieving it that differ—and even that gap is decreasing...

...They may be too beautiful, they may err by overemphasizing the totality at the expense of the individual's share, they may produce an unintended detachment in the viewer...

...There are giant swirls of movement, maelstroms of color, antipho-nal barrages of hoofbeats and cannon: a sense of ourselves being projected onto a screen larger than the canvas of our daily lives—something that demands to be experienced...

...in the dubbed version, they are positively stony...

...By the time some future, though not so very future, PhD candidate writes his dissertation on "The Comparative Esthetics of the Russian and American Cinemas," he will discover many more similarities than differences...

...The whole thing tries desperately for both art and pornography, and flops resoundingly as each and deafen-ingly as both...

...Both the Soviets and Hollywood go in for gigantism, obviousness, sentimentality and myth-ologizing, with only the natures of the myths being somewhat different...

...Indeed, these techniques become idees fixes with him: During the many ballroom sequences, there are always bits of colored muslin (ostensibly parts of the ladies' gowns) whooshing past the lens...

...This last is particularly distracting: By calling our attention to modern technology, it wrenches us out of Tolstoy's world...

...This is shocking when you consider that Prokofiev's opera War and Peace could have surely been converted into a worthy score...

...to be sure, Leo Tolstoy...

...Some other smaller parts are well handled: Kutuzov, Captain Tushin, and at least in looks and deportment, Napoleon...

...Still, inasmuch as what it gets to shoot is spectacular—imperial battlefields and ballrooms, wolf hunts and the burning of Moscow?it has its stretches of magnificence...

...The same with War and Peace, a novel I have not been able to get through—a fact I record neither proudly nor apologetically, only to indicate that I come to Sergei Bon-darchuk's enormous film version of the novel unprejudiced, except for memories of Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer, which is to say a prejudice in its favor...

...What remains is still monumental —including, unfortunately, the most intimate, personal details...

...She does her little dance rather well, but then she is a professional ballet dancer...

...Miltonic or Dickensian bulk, however, the bloatedness of Beethoven's "Ninth" or the chunki-ness of a Henry Moore family group, I can leave rather more easily than take...

...Even the "War" sequences, the best thing in.the film, are frequently marred by Bondarchuk's passion for superimposition...

...her acting seems to consist mostly of beams of bliss, pretty pouts, and, in moments of extreme tension, a palsied trembling of the head...

...The translation, whether an already existing one or made up to match the lip movements, is not memorable prose...

...The ineptly told story is that of the gropings of two girls toward lesbian fulfillment, until, shortly after consummation, Isabelle, suddenly and preposterously, disappears forever...

...if there was reckless stupidity in contemporary tactics and extravagant throwing away of life, that too is recorded with fanatical fidelity...

...Bondarchuk, the director and co-adapter, is a middle-aged, inflexible, uncharming Pierre...

...Anna Gael (Isabelle) has a lovely face...

...The sex scenes are ludicrous because Metzger, a producer and distributor of skin flicks who made an improbable fortune with the impossible /, a Woman, has (a) set himself up as a director, for which he has no talent whatever, and (b) attempted to make an art as well as sex film without the faintest notion of what art is all about...

...Radley Metzger, the producer-director, and Jesse Vogel, his scenarist, revel in cutting back and forth, throughout the film, between an unconvincingly middle-aged Essy Persson and an even more unconvincingly teen-age one...

...fine, but for her supposed age, overripe body...

...sometimes it is superimposed memories, flashbacks, slow dissolves...

...Even powerful, all-embracing, sublime bulk—Ruben-sian, Wagnerian, Dostoevskian—is nothing I would preconize...

...I much preferred Henry Fonda in the King Vidor version...

...failing that, there was always Shostakovich...

...The color photography is extremely workmanlike, but no more than that...

...The editing, costume and set design are all conscientious, albeit without particular brilliance...

...I am speaking, of course, of the typical product, not of the exception...

...But there is no getting away from the fact that they make the eye gape, that they give a sense of vast-ness and dazzlement if not awe, that they come as close to the Homeric as anything on film ever has...