I'm sure the consideration was financial for Henry Fonda to consider doing War and Peace. He said himself he wasn't right for the part, too old and too middle American with that Nebraska twang. I'm sure that Fonda who had three kids to support did this one for the money.
Personally I think that Sir Alec Guinness would have been a perfect Pierre. But I guess Guinness was busy with The Bridge on the River Kwai.
That being said this is a perfect Reader's Digest realization of Tolstoy's classic novel. If a three hour film could be called a Reader's Digest version of anything. War and Peace was later done as a mini-series and that was indeed a better framework for a work as sprawling as Tolstoy's.
The battle scenes at Austerlitz and Borodino and the French retreat from Russia are staged superbly. Dino De Laurentis had a DeMille like eye for spectacle and this is one of his best works.
Aside from Fonda the rest of the cast is well suited to their roles. John Mills has a brief, but telling part as Platon, a prisoner taken with Fonda during the Moscow occupation.
Come to think of it, Mills wouldn't have made a bad Pierre himself.
Personally I think that Sir Alec Guinness would have been a perfect Pierre. But I guess Guinness was busy with The Bridge on the River Kwai.
That being said this is a perfect Reader's Digest realization of Tolstoy's classic novel. If a three hour film could be called a Reader's Digest version of anything. War and Peace was later done as a mini-series and that was indeed a better framework for a work as sprawling as Tolstoy's.
The battle scenes at Austerlitz and Borodino and the French retreat from Russia are staged superbly. Dino De Laurentis had a DeMille like eye for spectacle and this is one of his best works.
Aside from Fonda the rest of the cast is well suited to their roles. John Mills has a brief, but telling part as Platon, a prisoner taken with Fonda during the Moscow occupation.
Come to think of it, Mills wouldn't have made a bad Pierre himself.