Nothing bad could be said about this film, but it has a few flaws. Henry Fonda is one of them, miscast and unconvincing although he acts well, he said so himself and was only in it for the money, Wilfred Lawson as the old Prince Bolkonsky is another, he was better as Alfred Dolittle and only good in comedies, but that is all. Of course it's impossible to squeeze a novel like "War and Peace" into a short film of 3,5 hours, but the effort was admirable enough, and the result is still definitely the cinematographically most impressive and beautiful screening of one of the greatest of novels. Every scene and picture is full of beauty, the photography is a marvel all through, which makes this film one of the most pictorially enjoyable ever made. To this comes Audrey Hepburn, Nino Rota's discreet but perfect music (with some apt borrowings from Russian sources), Mel Ferrer's absolutely proper rendering of a tragic case of detached disillusion constantly getting worse, and above all the case of Napoleon and his grande armée of 450,000 men going down the drain. There was never a better Napoleon on screen. One of the strongest impressions in the film is how he handles his whip, restlessly moving it on his back until it suddenly stops as he is faced by the reality of the situation in Moscow. Another is the epic rendering of the retreat, especially the tremendous disaster at Beresina, a chapter which Tolstoy jumps in his novel, as the Russians used the desperate situation of the French at the river crossing to mercilessly attack them. The epic war scenes, some of the most impressing in film history, were so far the costliest ecer made. Because of its so many outstanding advantages, this is for me the best film version of "War and Peace", in spite of its many inevitable shortcomings.