I'm seeing this 'sweeping epic' for the first time on TCM. It's pretty fascinating, really, though my younger self would never have understood why. Back then, I'd just turn the channel with a snap judgement of Why? and a yawn. Why resuscitate GWTW moviemaking 20 years later with the Tiber standing in for the Volga, and the international casting absurdities of Anita Ekberg, postsynched into a sophistate, as superannuated young Henry "Duke Bezukhov" Fonda's cousin Helene, and Audrey Hepburn with Hubby Mel Ferrer, and Vittorio Gassman and all the rest reciting reams of Tolystoyan dialectic lifted straight from the book. Why put this material in the hands of King Vidor reducing Tolstoy's dialogues to the horny ideological debates of THE FOUNTAINHEAD and his masochism tango riding crop romance and lust in the dust routine framed by Hermitage Picture Gallery high art compositions by Jack Cardiff...etc...

Why ask why, indeed. These things are increasingly their own reward (Audrey H warms my heart) as I grow older, as camp and as worthy craft teetering on genuine artistic achievement, and as part of a film history puzzle. This was being made as Visconti was tackling SENSO. THE LEOPARD got made as part of this cycle as well, and that film's recent revival creates a context (and a taste for more of the same) to appreciate this one's qualities.

Back to the movie in progress. Any thoughts?

I've been meaning to try and catch WAR AND PEACE the next time it was on and, of course, I missed it. (It's been years since I've seen it--and I only ever saw it on broadcast TV.) I don't know that it's a particularly good film, but all of those epics from that period are worth seeing, even if they're flawed. For one thing, they tended to go on location and use thousands of extras and film in old spots of the world and feature prominent Euro actors in the casts. I've seen within the last couple of years Sacha Guitry's NAPOLEON (1955), probably made contemporaneously with WAR AND PEACE, in its two-hour English dub version which cuts about an hour of footage and reduces the work of many famous guest stars to wordless cameos (e.g. Erich von Stroheim as Beethoven-!-and Orson Welles as some diplomat). At least we still get to see Yves Montand sing--in French. It's not a good movie, but it's fascinating to watch nonetheless.

Cinemascope was introduced in 1953 and took off in 1954, so Hollywood was doing a lot of these kinds of epics around that time: HELEN OF TROY, LAND OF THE PHARAOHS, ALEXANDER THE GREAT, THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, and you might want to consider AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS as part of that cycle. Of this group, only TEN COMMANDMENTS is really good, although I do like LAND OF THE PHARAOHS a great deal.

And then came stuff like THE VIKINGS (still one of my absolute favorites of the genre), SOLOMON AND SHEBA (also directed by Vidor, and the film that killed Tyrone Power), and, of course, BEN-HUR. And then SPARTACUS, EL CID, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE LONGEST DAY, FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, etc., etc., etc.

WAR AND PEACE is a little different because it was more about the characters and less about the spectacle, although there are indeed spectacular scenes. Besides, it had Henry Fonda wearing glasses, for cryin' out loud. What better way to signal "serious, dramatic epic"? (Leone made him take out his brown contact lenses for ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, remember?)

My favorite Napoleon film is one I reviewed for IMDB called IMPERIAL VENUS, from around 1961 or '63, which starred Gina Lollobrigida as Napoleon's sister and Raymond Pellegrin, who played Napoleon in the aforementioned NAPOLEON, as...guess who? Stephen Boyd is in it also. It's more of a melodrama than an epic, but I enjoyed it.

Today, CGI is the new Cinemascope so we get things like the MATRIX films, the LOTR trilogy and the Star Wars and Harry Potter films. There are historical epics still being made, but there's so much CGI involved in things like GLADIATOR and TROY, that some of the pleasures associated with the older films are missing from the newer ones. I still haven't seen the Oliver Stone ALEXANDER, so I don't know what that film does or doesn't do in connection with all this. MASTER AND COMMANDER showed you can still make an old-fashioned historical adventure without all the new bells and whistles as long as you've got a story and an interesting idea to motivate it and some engaging characters. And THE ALAMO, still my favorite historical drama in many years (since Oliver Stone's JFK, in fact).

I only made it to the 90 minute mark, but that's just because I had to go to bed before 2am.

It's quite engrossing, definitely of the same cut as the films you mention but with a continental twist, and that's where its novelty resides. You can see that this was the kind of "Dino De Laurentiis" production that the Viscontis also were (though those are, technically, Lux and Titanus). There's a bravery about letting ideas and chronicling of social fashions of a bygone day predominate. GATTOPARDO's Ball room scene is very much prefigured, and handsomely so. But there's the American twist which you'd never, ever have in Luchino V. At the same ball, we get repeated closeups of Audrey Hepburn with voiceovers out of a romantic comicbook such as "Gee, that Mel Ferrer is a hunk, so moody but I think he smiled at me. I would just melt with pleasure if he'd ask me to dance"! Pretty endearing or nauseating depending on your point of view.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS and WAR AND PEACE went against the grain by being filmed in widescreen VistaVision (1.85:1-ish) rather than 'Scope.

I disliked WAR AND PEACE intensely when I was a kid; except for the battle scenes, it just seemed interminable, unlike, say, SPARTACUS. But, now that I've seen (and enjoyed) many of King Vidor's more characteristic films, I like WAR AND PEACE more (except for Fonda's inexcusable black crepe paper rug, variants of which he also wore in WARLOCK and the "younger" scene in ...IN THE WEST). "Who else but Vidor would have had the courage to make WAR AND PEACE so simple a film?" David Thomson has written, and it's that authoritative, respectful approach, to subjects from politics to war to love, that I admire.

. . . I don't recall if WAR AND PEACE was presented in this manner, but one of the points that helped make these "big" films of the 1950s important at the time is that they usually played an exclusive engagemet at some Hollywood theater like the old Egyptian on a reserve seat basis (I seem to remember good tickets went for around $3.50), presented you with a fancy program on the way in (sometimes at an extra charge), and often stayed at this one cinema for several months to a year before going wide . . . I am afraid that this implantation of importance into my memory has lasted a long time and I am probably much too easy on some of these old classics when it comes to any critical judgement - I still become 10 years old whenever I watch THE ROBE (1953) and remember seeing the curtins pull back and back and back as the first Cinemascope film filled the frame at some fancy cinema in Oakland . . . I will keep the "Italian" idea in mind the next time I watch Vidor's WAR AND PEACE, but now I wonder if we should think about DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965) being filmed in Spain around the corner from all of those Italian westerns like A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965) and see if there was any influence on the very British Mr. Lean - were any of those cossacks wearing a sombrero . . .

In addition to Zhivago in Spain, there's "LAWRENCE OF ALMERIA".

There it works both ways. In GOOD, BAD, UGLY the Almeria dunes used by Leone are clearly meant to evoke the David Lean film and its associated 'epic sweep', this from a director who'd been trained on the sort of film you evoke and Brian mentioned (including HELEN OF TROY and BEN HUR) and whose personal benchmarks for a what a great movie should be included GONE WITH THE WIND and IL GATTOPARDO (he thought of remaking the former; ONCE...WEST was his attempt, so he said, to match Visconti's opulent period detail, and langourous, luxurious pace).