It's not awful, just not very good and very little, I won't say nothing, really to do with Tolstoy's story and intentions. It gives some of the visual scope, but truncates the story so much as to remove so much of its core meaning. As a film it is very dated in style, even for 1956, though Vidor tries to depict some Tolstoy detailed locations, he does it mostly in a very wooden dry and uninteresting way. But what really is missing is the sense of tragic implications each character carries with them, how life's unexpected changes rolls over every single character, over some harder than others. There is nothing of Tolstoy's vision of morality. There are no happy endings really, some better than other resolutions, and Pierre in the book was nothing like Henry Fonda. ONLY Audrey Hepburn captures a good deal of Natasha's spirit, but the slow awful decline of the Rostovs is not dealt with, or Natasha's own mortification at being tricked by Anatole Kuragin. Prince Andrei was a trapped character in the book beautifully drawn out, done whereas as the outset he is set up almost as the 'hero' at first only for Tolstoy to tear him up and down. None of this is in the film - it really needs an 8 hours-long film. For Tolstoy, Pierre is closest to a moral centre of the book but as a kind bumbling easily-led ineffectual but well-meaning character, often (mostly) terribly deceived and while he ends up with Natasha only as she becomes his blowsy hausfrau. The film is good just to see how most directors can't deal with good literature.
Review of War and Peace
