Word: bondarchuk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...book, the war was only the background framing the twin heroes, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (played by Vyacheslav Tikhonov) and his friend Pierre Bezukhov (played by Director Bondarchuk), who represent the two faces of the aristocracy. The outlines of the plot are familiar even to those nonreaders who saw the 1956 miniversion, with Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, and Henry Fonda. Andrei, a sophisticate and soldier, is unable to alter his archaic sensibilities and perishes in the war. Pierre, muddling through the chaos around him, does nothing right, but because he has the capacity to grow and change, he survives. Between...
...movie is awesome in war and pusillanimous in peace. For a single engagement, Director Sergei Bondarchuk could deploy 120,000 troops-supplied by the Soviet government, which has a stake in the film as message as well as art. And Bondarchuk makes the most of his forces. Cavalries plunge and break in tidal waves; columns of infantry writhe to the horizon and beyond; choruses of cannons shout like narrow mouths of hell in a series of vivid instants that recall the trancelike battle paintings of Uccello. With a knowing artist's eye, the director composes vignettes reminiscent...
...after all the excesses and errors, considerable power abides. Tolstoy's book may not have been reliable as history or wholly satisfactory as fiction; yet it achieved, in the words of Tolstoy's biographer, Henri Troyat, "the majesty of a second Genesis." Bondarchuk's film catches part of that majesty by showing Mother Russia dressed in the 19th century's bloodstained finery, overshadowing her doomed, noble children. She, and she alone, is worth two trips to the movie house...
...father is actually a stepfather (Sergei Bondarchuk), and in the film's first episode he strides into the boy's world like a giant out of a fairy tale. Huge-eyed with fright, the child watches the giant as he splutters prodigiously at the bathroom washbowl. Working up his courage, he inquires in a very small voice: "Are you going to whip me?" The man replies: ''Why should I?" A light wakes in the child's eyes. When his stepfather leaves the bathroom, Seryozha goes shyly to the washbowl, makes a tentative little splutter...
Fate of a Man (in Russian). Sergei Bondarchuk, a top Soviet film maker, directs his own powerful performance in this freely sentimental story of a soldier who is reduced to flotsam by war, then made whole again by the love of an orphan...