Synopsis
War and Peace, Part I: Andrei Bolkonsky (1966) — watch online on iFILM — is the opening chapter of Sergei Bondarchuk's monumental Soviet production, in which the director also plays Pierre Bezukhov. Vyacheslav Tikhonov stars as Prince Andrei; Lyudmila Savelyeva as Natasha Rostova. The first of four parts, produced at Mosfilm.
It is 1805. Pierre falls into inherited wealth and a cold marriage to the Kuragin beauty. Andrei, restless in the drawing rooms of St. Petersburg, secures a place on Kutuzov's staff and rides out to meet Napoleon's forces. The fighting at Austerlitz breaks everything he expected of war: the glory he was looking for isn't there. Word reaches home — incorrectly — that he has been killed. By the time he returns, his wife Liza has died in childbirth.
Bondarchuk shot the full four-part project over six years, committing Mosfilm's biggest-ever budget and thousands of military extras to the battle sequences. The completed film took the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1969. Few productions in cinema history have matched it for sheer scale. Stream War and Peace, Part I (1966) online on iFILM.
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