Word: natasha
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...music of the first part and the situations that it animated glowed with an almost Latin fervor. Andrey and Natasha (well sung by Morley Meredith and Helena Scott) faced each other across a garden ashiver with moonlight and poured out their yearnings in great warm gusts of melody; Natasha pirouetted giddily at a ball and lacily sang her infatuation with Anatol across the shimmer and sheen of violins. In one magnificent ball scene, a percussive, insistent invitation to the dance ("Dance, dance, dance the waltz") eerily foreshadowed the dance of death that was to come on the battlefields. In other...
...hymn of thanks for victory. The second part also produced the most authoritative acting-and one of the finest voices-in Baritone Kenneth Smith, who played General Kutuzov with sinewy dignity. High point of the opera came in one of the closing scenes, in which Andrey and Natasha were reunited as Andrey lay on his deathbed. Through his delirium he hears a pulsing beat, played in the orchestra by the strings sul ponticello (bow strokes near the bridge), and echoes it over and over again in a faint, falling cry. In one of Prokofiev's most dramatic musical inventions...
...might almost have been better if the adaptation had departed as far from the facts of the novel as it does from its spirit. The central event--Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812--still remains, and so do a considerable number of the major characters. Natasha Rostov still falls in love with the noble soldier, Prince Andrey, and out again, and in again just before Andrey dies. Pierre Bezuhov still marries a worthless woman and fights a duel over her. But their actions, as well as those of some of the minor characters, often appear purely mechanical, without...
Most of the actors are in their own way just as impressive as the grand spectacles. The part of Natasha seems almost to have been created solely to exploit the impressive talents of Audrey Hepburn. In the early scenes she captures perfectly the spirit of the young girl, and later also manages to show her growth into maturity. The script prevents Henry Fonda from indicating the paralled development within Pierre Bezuhov, and so he is forced to work with his character's huge and clumsy exterior. But Fonda too possesses a lot of talent, and he demonstrates just how much...
...film's three stars, only Audrey Hepburn, with her precocious child's head set upon a swanlike neck, looks the part. She is perfectly the Natasha described by Tolstoy: "A dark-eyed little girl, plain, but full of life, with her wide mouth, her childish bare shoulders ... her black lair brushed back, her slender arms . . ." In her playing, Audrey catches the gamine qualities of Natasha, and her softness. What is lacking is the steely courage that would let Natasha brand her flesh with a red-hot iron to prove her love. Instead of a total commitment to life...