June
6
War and Peace Plays LACMA
Tonight I will see the first two parts of the four part, seven hour 1967 Russian War and Peace at the Los Angeles Country Museum of Art. I saw it for the first time when I was in high school at Manhattan's Elgin Theatre; it played from midnight to six A.M. in a dubbed version; my whole family went and we did not sleep a wink. It was one of the best movies I have ever seen. (It's based on one of the best works of literature, too.) We'll see how it holds up in this longer, subtitled version. Apparently the version the Academy screened back in 1967 was subtitled. It won the foreign film Oscar.
LACMA will screen War and Peace on three consecutive weekends, Friday and Saturday nights, so folks will have a chance to catch up with it. UPDATE: There is no way to rent this on DVD a PBS DVD of a six-hour subtitled version. There are probably old VHS copies of the dubbed one kicking around. Each of the four-part Russian TV series segments ended in a cliffhanger; they ran eight hours. Russian New Yorker Alla Verlotsky's Seagull Films finds undistributed Russian films and makes subtitled prints of them. When the Russians did their restoration of the 70 mm War and Peace, they made a 35 mm print.
According to LACMA film curator Ian Birnie, the Russians actually created an army unit of some 100,000 soldiers to act in the movie. "There are a lot of people on-screen," he says. "It must have been horrible to make."
UPDATE: Here's the LAT's interview with Verlotsky. She and Edward Goldman are a bit tough on actor-director Sergei Bondarchuk, who plays the role of Pierre Buzukhov, quite well. During the first two installments of this $100-million epic, even after a tough work-week, I remained alert. The mise-en-scene is a tad heavy-handed and very 60s, true, but the narrative carries the day. These are great characters. And the scale and scope of the CG-free battles, the vistas, the cannon-fire and fast-moving horses, is stunning.
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I hope it makes it to Chicago, it's a movie on my very short list of haven't seen and must see. If I were in L.A. this weekend I'd even skip the Cubs games at Dodger stadium to screen it.
Posted by: mitkid | June 06, 2008 at 08:11 PM
@ mitkid
HEY! Where have you been? War and Peace DID play in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center in June of last year. In fact it was so successful that it was held over for another month. I saw it and is it extraordinary. I had only seen parts of it before many many years ago as a kid when ABC showed it on TV. but it has to be seen on the big screen to be really appreciated.
It was available on DVD briefly in the U.S. from a Russian company called Ruscico which Image Enetrainment distributed in the country. (I've seen it too, so I'm maybe one of the few people who has seen this film TWICE) You might be able to find use used copies for sale on Amazon or Ebay. BUT BE CAREFUL. AVOID by all means the Kultur DVD of the film which is the crummy, pan-and-scan, badly dubbed version they released on VHS.
Which reminds me, when is someone finally going to release on DVD Bondarchuk's Waterloo produced by Dino De Laurentiis with Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington that Paramount released in the early 70's? Steiger is really bad, Plummer is really good and the battle scenes are jaw dropping amazing.
Posted by: Sergio | June 07, 2008 at 11:47 AM
i think we went to the flick. was michael there? i think not.
Posted by: az | June 07, 2008 at 05:14 PM
hey Airline, I remember Torry, Charlie, Becky, you and Michael, too.
Posted by: Anne Thompson | June 07, 2008 at 05:48 PM
All I can say is I must have been travelling when the review came out, never would have missed it otherwise, especially since the Gene Siskel Film Center is a good place to see a movie,
Posted by: mitkid | June 08, 2008 at 11:20 AM
ah. an early v of the pomo family. interesting that mitkid and i both responded to this one!
Posted by: az | June 08, 2008 at 11:50 AM