The motion picture called War and Peace scarcely resembles Tolstoy's War and Peace. Considering the size of the novel, the number of its characters, and the complexity of its ideas, that fact is hardly to be wondered at and not entirely to be condemned. The only trouble is that once the team of six writers who "adapted" the book decided to discard the philosophy of Tolstoy as impossible to dramatize, they failed to settle on a point of view of their own. And so they and director King Vidor produced a huge, handsome picture which might be called a historical romance, complete with all the superficial charm and the vacuity that the name implies.

It 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 any inner logic that makes it all plausible. These people, even Napoleon, appear to be puppets, on the strings of an invisible master who is not allowed to speak.

If purely technical excellence carried an ethical value of its own, then War and Peace would rank among the finest pictures ever made, because technically it is superb. Photographed in Vista-Vision on a film that for once neither glares nor blurrs the colors together, the movie displays a seemingly endless array of attractive palaces and costumes. Furthermore, Vidor's staging of the Battle of Borodino, especially a sequence showing the French troops storming a Russian artillery position, includes perhaps the best battle scenes ever filmed.

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 of an art an actor, naturally trained to move smoothly, can make of moving without grace. The least satisfactory of the starring trio is Mel Ferrer, who displays more stiffness than grandeur. As portrayed by Oscar Homolka, the Russian commander, General Kutuzov, has considerably more moral force, particularly in a scene where he thanks God for the delivery of his country from danger after Napoleon withdraws from Moscow.

War and Peace is a picture that starts from the wrong end, from the incidents of the novel rather than its essence. But what it finally shows, it shows well.