New restored, unbutchered DVD released!
The news is here: http://ruscico.com/articles_eng.php
A few interesting things to note:
The actual length of the movie is 94 minutes, not 84 as IMDB wrongly states (that was the "butchered" US version)
The huge battle was actually an elaborate illusion (Guiness made a mistake by taking the "cast of 106,000" statement as fact)
This was the first Russian movie filmed in anamorphic widescreen and multi-channel stereo sound
Full text from the RusCiCo website:
(Sight & Sound, February 2005)
The only way Aleksandr Ptushko's heroic fable Ilya Muromets was available to English-speaking audiences until recently was in a bastardised 84-minute edition called The Sword and the Dragon. This much-weakened version - pan and scanned, rewritten and dumbed down and with washed-out colours - was produced for the US kiddie-matinee market in 1960 and is still available on VHS. Sentimentalists may want to grab a copy fast, because with the Russian Cinema Council's DVD release of the film in its original form - as restored in 2001 - it's bound for imminent extinction.
Ilya Muromets retells the Russian folk tale of Ilya (Boris Andreyev), a bear of a man born without the use of his arms and legs. One day he invites some beggars into his home and they reward him with a herbal draught that gives him the strength to actuate his limbs. He asks his farmer parents to release him from his filial obligations so he can go to Kiev - under siege from the Tartars - to defend his country. On the way he defeats a wind demon called Nightingale the Robber. But Ilya's boastfulness about his fighting prowess wins him political enemies and following the kidnapping of his pregnant wife Vassilisa (Yelena Myshkova) by the Tartars he is imprisoned for ten years, during which time his son is raised to be the Tartars' greatest warrior. When Kiev needs Ilya for its defence the Prince sets him free and he leads his compatriots into battle against the Tartars and their three-headed ?ying dragon.
Produced by Mosfilm, Ilya Muromets was the first Russian feature photographed in anamorphic widescreen and recorded in multi-channel stereo sound, both of which are rendered magnificently here. (The 5.1 track sounds slightly dated, adding to its sense of authenticity.) Promotional material for the 1960 US release boasted "A Cast of 106,000! 11,000 Horses!" (taken as the truth by Patrick Robertson in The Guinness Book of Movie Records) when in fact the shots of oceans of soldiers are an illusion devised by Ptushko, whose background - from 1935's The New Gulliver - was in stop-motion animation and trick photography involving meticulously pre-planned multiple exposures. This blueprint for the CGI crowd scenes of such recent pictures as Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead is complemented by another piece of technical prophecy: the elaborate make-up for Nightingale the Robber, which involved the use of air bladders secreted beneath a latex outer skin. Indeed, in nearly every way Ilya Muromets remains a state-of-the-art spectacle, different from present-day efforts only in that everything about it looks impressively hand-made, from the painted backdrops and decorative details of the sets and costumes to the life-size, fully articulated, fire-breathing dragon. As a detailed evocation of a world now lost to us, the film is the equal of Barry Lyndon.
As usual with Ruscico releases, every endeavour has been made to render the film viewable by as wide an audience as possible. There are five audio tracks (Russian mono, plus 5.1 tracks in Russian, English, French and Arabic) and subtitles in a dozen languages including Swedish and Hebrew. The extras contain a 30-minute documentary about Ptushko, which will have you ordering his other Gilliamesque fantasies from Ruscico; a six-minute statement by the son of featured actor Sergei Stolyarov (also the star of Ptushko's 1952 Sadko, which a young Francis Ford Coppola helped transform into The Magic Voyage of Sinbad for Roger Corman), which alludes to his blacklisting by the Soviet film community; filmographies for key cast and crew; and a stills gallery. The DVD is available from www.rbcmp.com, which offers an 11-minute sampling of the climax as an online preview.