Our King Vidor retrospective closes with his final box-office triumph, the1956 adaptation of War and Peace, screened tonight as it so rarely is-inan original 35mm Technicolor print. The film adheres to Tolstoy's novelof the Napoleonic campaign into Russia but, forced to squeeze 1500 pagesinto three-and-a-half hours, focuses on cousins Natasha (Audrey Hepburn)and Pierre (Henry Fonda), children of privilege brought to moral, andromantic, maturity by war-much as was the passive hero of Vidor's TheBig Parade back at the opening of this retrospective. It is true thatthe wild vitality of Vidor's usual postwar style gets thoroughly boggeddown in the imperial grandeur, and that the dialogue does sound exactlywhat it was-the product of a seven-person multi-lingual committee racingto bring Dino De Laurentiis' production to the screen before otherannounced versions. The oddity, too, of the international cast is alltoo evident. But the film could hardly be more visually striking,particularly in the coherently orchestrated battles (directed by Vidor,who left a few intimate scenes to second-unit director Mario Soldati).As Variety enthused about the "blockbuster" spectacle and JackCardiff's "peerless" cinematography, "For once, it's aproduction that looks more than its $6,000,000 investment....It isTechnicolor at its artistic peak." Scott Simmon