Word: tolstoys
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...probably has more right with it, and more wrong, than any film of recent years. As a super-colossal spectacle, costing $6,000,000, running 3^ hours, and employing a dozen topflight stars and some 8,000 extras, it rivals Gone With the Wind. But as a reflection of Tolstoy's absorbed peeling back of the contradictory layers of human nature, it is nearly valueless. In his tremendous novel, Tolstoy's characters are so alive that they seem more like family and friends than fictional creations. On the VistaVision screen, these same people are only too clearly actors...
...Director Vidor, unfortunately, must also deal with an involved story covering many lives and stretching across many years. Twenty hours of film would not be enough to do Tolstoy justice, and Vidor has less than four. The inevitable result is a telescoping of scenes and a hopscotching through the plot that scat ters attention from one leading character to another. The cast speaks in discordant accents, ranging from Cockney to Italian to Middle European to Middlewestern, and some of the most complex of Toltoy's people can only be hinted at: Dolokhov (Helmut Dantine) is a gutural swashbuckler...
...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...
Subject of his observation: the beautiful, slightly mysterious "woman with a past" who appears, unannounced, amid the pastel parasols of a fashionable resort, bringing with her a whiff of evil−that exquisite cliche beloved by turn-of-the-century authors from Tolstoy to Henry James. She has now been revived by a determinedly anonymous author, in an engaging and disturbing period piece. The lady is called Madame Solario, and her setting is Lake Como...
Returning God's Ticket. Facing death and chaos head on, the Outsider is heaven-bent, one might say, on finding a transcending meaning and purpose for human existence. In varying ways, he is driven to ask the questions Tolstoy put to himself in his soth year in A Confession: "What is life? Why should I live? Why should I do anything? Is there any meaning in life that can overcome inevitable death?" As he tries to cope with these questions, the Outsider's horizon clouds over with the problem of evil. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, reduced...