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MovieMail's Review
If Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist provided the style manual for a generation of 1970s filmmakers, and Last Tango in Paris anticipated the decade's increasing sexual frankness, then 1900 looked forward to Apocalypse Now and Heaven's Gate. Like them, it's an impossibly ambitious epic: Bertolucci sought to combine the epic sweep of a Gone with the Wind or Doctor Zhivago with the novelistic density of a Tolstoy but also the graphic immediacy of a Soviet revolutionary poster.
As Bertolucci candidly admits in an accompanying interview, "I was completely nuts", not least in his original plan to bring American and Soviet audiences together through a tale that ultimately stresses the ideological superiority of Italian Communism. Since the film barely opened in the US or USSR, this was never put to the test, though it was a huge hit in Europe in Bertolucci's preferred five-hour cut (the one on this DVD).
Despite its gargantuan length, the story could hardly be simpler. Spanning the ends of two eras, from Giuseppe Verdi's death in 1901 to the liberation of Italy in 1945, it begins with two boys being born on the same day. Alfredo (Robert De Niro) is from a landowning family, while Olmo (Gérard Depardieu) is of peasant stock. Although lifelong friends, the class division between them ensures that their lives run along very different paths, though Alfredo's innate humanity prevents him from wholeheartedly endorsing the increasingly successful Fascists (personified by Donald Sutherland's monstrous cat and child-murdering Attila), even when he inherits the family business and the status of 'padrone' that comes with it.
With Vittorio Storaro behind the camera and Ennio Morricone on musical duties, 1900 looks and sounds as gorgeous as one would expect. The presence of supporting actors Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Dominique Sanda and Alida Valli establishes links to classic Hollywood and European cinema, especially Luchino Visconti's films Senso (Valli) and The Leopard (Lancaster).
But it's also very much a Bertolucci film, with De Niro and Depardieu revealing even more than Marlon Brando did in Last Tango, especially in the notorious scene where they end up sharing the same woman.
When this was originally released on UK DVD in 2007, the opening credit sequence lasting about three minutes, and a scene was mistakenly omitted. This has been corrected for this re-issue
2 discs
1900: The Story, The Cast (14 mins) and 1900: Creating An Epic (14 mins). English dubbing with optional subtitles.
Film Description
In the wake of the controversy that surrounded his previous film, Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci plunged himself into this sweeping, epic film about the political turmoils and class warfare that took place in Italy in the first half on the 20th century. It chronicles the lives of two men born on the same day in 1900. Depardieu plays the bastard born of peasant stock, De Niro the man born to a land owner.
1900 is ambitious, compelling, flawed, beautiful, majestic and out of control. Pauline Kael called it "a romantic moviegoer's version of the class struggle - a love poem for the movies as well as for the life of those who live communally on the land."
