By now the statistics regarding War and Peace are well known, but forgive me if I recite them with a certain relish anyway: The film was five years in the making at a cost of $100 million, with a cast of one hundred twenty thousand, all clothed in authentic uniforms, and the Red Army was mobilized to re-create Napoleon’s battles exactly (it is claimed) as they happened. The prestige of the Soviet film industry rested on War and Peace for half a decade, and the result looks like it. You are never, ever going to see anything to equal it.
