War and Peace

A late-career epic produced by Dino De Laurentiis and shot by Jack Cardiff, Vidor’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s epoch-defining novel is a historical film of unsurpassed scope and depth. Audrey Hepburn stars as Natasha Rostova, the daughter of a Russian count whose family is swept up in the tides of the Napoleonic Wars. Natasha’s journey runs parallel to that of Pierre Bezokhov (Henry Fonda), a friend of the Rostov family and the illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov, who initially looks to Napoleon as a world-historical figure whose conquests will bring equality and freedom to Russia, only for his views to shift as the Napoleonic forces eventually arrive in Russia in violation of the 1807 peace treaty signed by Bonaparte and Czar Alexander I. A masterful adaptation of one of the all-time great works of literature, War and Peace perhaps remains unsurpassed among Hollywood epics in its scale and emotional resonance.