Synopsis
War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812 (1967) — watch online on iFILM — is the third chapter of Sergei Bondarchuk's four-part adaptation of Tolstoy's novel, produced at Mosfilm across 1965–67.
Napoleon's Grande Armée has crossed into Russia. Kutuzov (Boris Zakhava) takes command and summons Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov) — who turns down a staff post and requests a regiment at the front. Pierre Bezukhov (Bondarchuk himself) rides to Borodino as a civilian, white top hat and all, and ends up beside an artillery battery in the worst of the fighting. That sequence — cannon smoke, dying men, a camera that refuses to look away — remains the benchmark of Soviet war cinema.
Bondarchuk mobilized roughly 120,000 Red Army soldiers as extras and shot the battle from aircraft and at ground level simultaneously. The complete four-part series took home the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1969. Stream War and Peace (1967) online on iFILM.
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