Cinema: The New Pictures, Oct. 16, 1944

1812 (Mosfilm) is the most ambitious Soviet fiction film to reach the U.S. since the war began. It is not to be compared with the dynamitic masterpieces of Eisenstein or Dovzhenko; but even in decline the Russians can show the world a thing or two about movies.

Too busy at the real thing to throw much paraphernalia into make-believe, Director Vladimir Petrov and his associates boil their war down pretty close to its essence: a duel of mind and spirit between Napoleon, who understood little except warfare, and the apparently sleepy Field Marshal Kutuzov,...