6.7 | / 10 |
Users | 5.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Napoleon's tumultuous relations with Russia, including his disastrous 1812 invasion, serve as the backdrop for the tangled personal lives of several aristocratic families. Filmed in VistaVision.
Starring: Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer, Herbert Lom, Anita EkbergRomance | 100% |
Drama | 95% |
History | 32% |
War | 24% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: Dolby TrueHD Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
French: Dolby Digital Mono
English, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 2.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
King Vidor's 1956 film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace has the distinction of being the first screen version of the Russian master's epic, but it hasn't aged well. Tolstoy's famously massive tome is one of the longest novels ever written, and it embraces so much history and philosophy that the author himself disputed that it could accurately be called a novel. Much of the book's impressive accuracy arose from its author's pure research, more journalism than art, interviewing survivors of Napoleon's invasion of Russia, reading contemporary letters and journals, doing the kind of factual sifting usually performed by historians. Large stretches of the book are devoted to Tolstoy's own theory of history. As much as it is a multi-part story, War and Peace is also a treatise on storytelling. By general consensus, the best filmed adaptation of War and Peace to date is the 1966 Russian release directed by Sergey Bondarchuk, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film and, at over seven hours, is more than twice the length of Vidor's. Radical cutting of Tolstoy's story was required to achieve a screenplay (credited to six writers, including Vidor) that could be covered in just under three and a half hours. The choice decreed by producers Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti was to focus on the tormented love stories played out against the background of the French invasion. Although Vidor was able to stage several impressive battle scenes with massive casts of extras, the most extended do not occur until the latter half of the film. For much of its running time, tremulous emotion predominates over military history. Unfortunately, by today's standards, the writing, staging and acting are so stiffly unconvincing that even the presence of Audrey Hepburn cannot breathe enough life into them to make this version of War and Peace compelling. War and Peace is one of the Paramount titles being released by Warner under its licensing arrangement in the U.S. and Canada. As discussed more fully in the Video section, Warner has had less involvement with this release than with previous Paramount catalog titles it has distributed under this deal. Paramount alone is responsible for the Blu-ray's poor quality.
Nearly all of the prior Paramount catalog titles released by Warner under its licensing deal have been mastered by Warner with its style of menu, but War and Peace was prepared for Blu-ray entirely by Paramount. The disc has been mastered using BD-Java (a rarity on Warner discs), and it displays a Paramount logo when it loads. The bookmarking feature, pop-up menu and "progress bar" during fast forward are all implemented in the style of Paramount's Blu-rays, not Warner's. All Warner has done is add its logo to the disc art and put the disc in a case. War and Peace was a VistaVision production shot by the legendary Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes), whose work here was nominated for an Oscar. But you'd never know it from the image on Paramount's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. Although I am usually reluctant to opine on the age of a transfer, in this case I have no hesitation in pronouncing this an old image capture, and not a very good one. The source materials show noticeable damage of the kind that could be digitally repaired, if the studio wished to invest in doing so. Speckles, dust and small damage marks appear throughout, as does a white line from top to bottom that appears in the 57th minute and remains, with greater and lesser visibility, until approximately 1:05:35 (see screenshot 20 for a clear example). Colors are generally bland and frequently washed out, which is especially noteworthy in a film nominated by the Academy for both its cinematography and costume design. For example, in long shots involving the French and Russian armies, the difference between the blue uniforms of the former and the predominantly green or red garb of the latter should make the distinctions obvious, but the Blu-ray image is so undersaturated that the difference doesn't "pop" as it should. The splendor of Moscow's upper class social life remains understated, even at a gala ball where Natasha and Prince Andrei first dance. The burning of Moscow lacks the requisite visual impact, because pre-war Moscow is less colorful than it should be. If this were a Roger Corman low budget feature, one might be satisfied with the amount of detail in faces and clothing, but this is a major studio production with big stars shot in a high-resolution, large-negative format. The flat foregrounds, blurry backgrounds and general smoothness of the image suggests substantial filtering of the data to eliminate fine detail, and the grain pattern (when there is any) skitters unnaturally. This appears to be a master prepared for the DVD medium and repurposed for Blu-ray, perhaps with some minor tweaking. The best that can be said of it is that it doesn't suffer from the egregious oversharpening artifacts that made Paramount's Hatari! painful to watch. But that is damning with faint praise indeed. With no extras, Paramount has achieved an average bitrate of 23.995 Mbps, which is quite good for this talky 208-minute film. But War and Peace is a textbook example of how little the bitrate matters when one starts with a master that looks poor to begin with.
Although the disc jacket indicates that the mono soundtrack is provided in 1.0, in fact the format is 2.0 mono, with identical left and right channels, encoded in lossless Dolby TrueHD. As the film's credits indicate, a stereo version was created, but either it hasn't survived or it has not been deemed usable for some reason. The mono soundtrack is serviceable, with clear dialogue, good but limited dynamic range and decent reproduction of the score by Nino Rota (The Godfather). Those attentive to the fine points of sound editing may notice how frequently common effects (the closing of a door, the clink of a glass) are omitted from the soundtrack of War and Peace. Whether this was a deliberate choice or a cost-saving measure is impossible to say.
No extras are included. Paramount's 2002 DVD contained a re-release trailer and an original trailer entitled "Behind the Scenes of War and Peace".
In addition to previous adaptations, the BBC is poised to air a new six-part adaptation of War and Peace. My suggestion would be to wait for that version to come to Blu-ray, because it will almost certainly be superior to this dated effort. Even for devoted fans of Audrey Hepburn, War and Peace is not her best work, and Paramount has treated it poorly on Blu-ray.
1957
1943
2001
2016
Lady Hamilton
1941
1927
2012
Special Edition
1978
1954
1932
Limited Edition to 3000
1979
45th Anniversary Edition
1965
1946
1934
Love & Honor
2013
Il gattopardo
1963
80th Anniversary Edition
1942
2015
1943
Special Edition
1974