War and Peace
If it were not for this list, I honestly would never have watched this film, which I have found to be really, really outdated. While Tolstoy’s book is pure brilliancy and interesting even for today, the superficial characters and views on life made me facepalm quite a few times. Well, as the title says, I only have “The Children’s Hour” from the list to watch, but from my experience, I like Audrey Hepburn’s comedies much more so far. I would much rather watch “Funny Face”, “Charade” and “How to steal a million” before I go on watching “The Children’s Hour”, despite a surely brilliant Shirley MacLaine. Hm.
Enough blabbering, onto the review itself: Like movies about war always do, the topic of life and death has left quite a deep impression on me. I was really, really sad when the companion of Pierre died. From his views on life and his great care for the little dog, he definitely was the most sympathetic character and of course his death meant to be sad. In my case, it really touched me. T_T Just like this case, however, the movie uses extremely stereotypical characters and dialogue, it was quite a pain. In my opinion, 3 hours for “War and Peace” is just not enough. Just like how Anna Karenina and her husband change their minds about their divorce and relationship about three or four times throughout the book, although nothing new has really happened (Anna loves Vronsky and that’s it), Natasha Rostova has fallen in love with three men throughout the book – but that spans over 3000 pages and her feelings are aptly described. In the movie however, she falls in love with three men within 2 hours, and especially her switch from the Andre to Pierre was absolutely not explicable at all. In one scene, Andre dies, then you have quite a bunch of epic war scenes and immediately after those are over, she jumps into Pierre’s arms. Finito. Oh well, I suppose people don’t really care about that, and from the book, I think that Natasha and Pierre make quite a good couple, so all is well.
Apart from this, I am fully aware of how impressive the war scenes in the movie are for that time, but do I care about that? Most definitely not. What I liked the most about the movie was actually the final scene which consists in a citation of Tolstoy, saying that what is the most important is to love life itself, as loving life is loving God. I was so delighted to see that because that felt like so tolstoy-ish somehow, “love for life” seems to be the essence of all his works to me.
Finally, my current ranking looks like this:
1. Wait until dark
2. Roman Holiday
3. Sabrina
4. Love in the Afternoon
5. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
6. War and Peace
7. Two for the Road
8. My Fair Lady