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Because life is at such hazard, we value those who lead their lives all in one place, doing one thing. Such continuity is reassuring. We are buffeted by the winds of fate, but the Trappist tills his field and the blacksmith stands beneath his tree. There is a certain charm in the notion of a man who is born on board an ocean liner and never gets off. He does not move, yet is never still.

The man's full name is Danny Boodmann T.D. Lemon 1900. That is because as a squawling infant he was discovered on the luxury liner Virginian by a man named Boodmann, in a lemon box, in the year 1900. He is reared in the engine room, his cradle swaying as the ship rolls, and as an adult plays piano in the ship's lounge. And what piano! So great is his fame that even the great Jelly Roll Morton comes on board for a duel.

1900 is played as an adult by Tim Roth , he of the sad eyes and rueful grin. Night after night he sits at his keyboard, as crews change and ports slip behind. His best friend is Max ( Pruitt Taylor Vince), a trumpet player in the ship's orchestra, and his story is told through Max's eyes. It begins almost at the end, when Max finds an old wax recording in an antiques shop, and recognizes it as 1900's love melody to the only woman who almost got him to leave the ship.

The movie was directed by Giuseppe Tornatore , whose " Cinema Paradiso " was much beloved in 1988. Like a lot of European directors, he despairs of ever finding large U.S. audiences with subtitles, and shot this movie in English. (Europeans do not object to dubbing.) "The Legend of 1900" nevertheless seems mournfully, romantically Italian, and could be an opera. There is something heroic about a man whose whole life is ruled by the fixed idea that he must not step foot on dry land.

There is also something pigheaded and a little goofy. That side of 1900 seems to lurk just out of sight in scenes like the one where he and Jelly Roll pound out tunes in what seems more like a test of speed and volume than musicianship. We sense, as 1900 plays, that he loves music less than himself--that he is defending not his ability as a pianist but his decision to stay on the ship: See, he seems to be saying, I never went to New Orleans and yet look at my fingers fly.

Decades come and go. Fashions change. 1900 remains steadfast even during the war. Then one day something happens to stir him to his fundament. A woman comes on board. The Girl, for so she is called, is played by Melanie Thierry as an angelic vision who never pauses on the deck unless she is perfectly framed by a porthole directly in the sight line of the moody pianist. It is true love. It must be: It gets him halfway down the gangplank.

There is a mystery to an ocean liner. It is vast, yet self-contained. It has secrets, but they can be discovered. Somewhere even today, hidden on the Norway, which used to be the France, is a private first-class courtyard. You can find it. 1900 is the secret of the Virginian, whose shadows and secret passages he haunts like the hunchback of Notre Dame or the phantom of the opera.

His story was originally written not as a screenplay or a novel, but as a monologue, by Alessandro Baricco . The film has inevitably been compared to " Titanic ," but has more in common with the little-known French film "A Chambermaid on the Titanic" (1997), about a man who wins a free ticket on the Titanic. The night before sailing, he is seduced by a woman who says she works on the ship. Does she? Or does she only want to steal his ticket? The monologue he makes of his experience grows in popularity until he has to perform it professionally. You see how ships can make us storytellers.

"The Legend of 1900" has moments of great imagination: a scene, for example, where the piano rolls back and forth across the polished dance floor in a storm, and 1900 keeps on playing. But it never quite develops the conviction we expect. What does it think of this man? Is he crazy or heroic? Nice or narcissistic? At the end we are left with Max the trumpet player, treasuring the sound of an old recording and assuring the antiques dealer that this was some kinduva guy. Yes, but what kinduva guy? And why?

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

The Legend Of 1900 (1999)

Rated R For Language

119 minutes

Clarence Williams III as Jelly Roll Morton

Melanie Thierry as The Girl

Pruitt Taylor Vince as Max

Bill Nunn as Danny Boodmann

Written and Directed by

• Giuseppe Tornatore

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MOVIE REVIEW : Bertolucci’s ‘1900’ Restored--in English

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Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” (at the Nuart for a week) is truly what the French call a film maudit , or “cursed” film.

The original Italian-language version of the film ran five hours and 11 minutes, but in its 1977 U.S. release, it was in English and cut by more than an hour. Now, Paramount has restored the footage--under the guidance of Bertolucci’s master cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro--and re-recorded the soundtrack in Dolby stereo. But it’s still in English.

Only subscribers to the now-defunct Z Channel ever saw the full-length Italian version. It was aired by that innovative L.A. pay-cable service six years ago, using English subtitles, and that is by far the best way to see the movie.

Yet even in the full-length Italian version, “1900” is too emotionally extravagant ever to be considered a masterpiece. Rather, it’s a monumental achievement like such original and impassioned but scarcely flawless screen epics as D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Abel Gance’s “Napoleon.”

Bertolucci and his collaborators, you may recall, attempt to trace the political and social history of Italy from the the turn of the century to the end of World War II through the lives of two friends, landowner Robert De Niro and peasant Gerard Depardieu. Although told with an unyielding Marxist fervor, “1900” overflows with an abundant love of life in all its beauty and pain, sensuality and despair. Not for Bertolucci is the detachment of that other aristocratic Italian leftist, the late Luchino Visconti.

Burt Lancaster and the late Sterling Hayden are their usual robust selves as the grandfathers of De Niro and Depardieu, respectively, and leave the film fairly early on. But over the long haul, Donald Sutherland’s sadistic, all-but-drooling Fascist foreman verges on Simon Legree caricature. He is not helped by being teamed with Laura Betti (speaking heavily accented English) in an over-the-top performance as De Niro’s jealous, raving cousin, a hysteric who marries Sutherland out of vengeance.

As exciting as it is to see De Niro and Depardieu working together, De Niro in this version seems miscast. His street-wise New Yorker’s voice is hardly that of a landed Northern Italian aristocrat, and it’s hard to buy him as a weakling as well. Faring best is Dominique Sanda, cast as De Niro’s beautiful, extravagantly self-destructive French wife.

Where the film is an unalloyed triumph is in its visuals, for Storaro’s images are awesomely gorgeous whether Bertolucci is expressing joy or sorrow, triumph or tragedy or intent on recording poverty or luxury, unspoiled vistas or elegant interiors. Camera movement, too, is as baroque and full-bodied as Ennio Morricone’s score.

Bertolucci, reached by phone in Rome, diplomatically avoided expressing a preference between the two full-length versions; the film and its fate clearly remains a painful subject for him. However, to hear De Niro, Sutherland, Lancaster and Hayden speaking English in their own natural voices, none of them attempting Italian accents, makes them seem all the less Italian. To American ears, Depardieu dubbed into Italian is less distracting than hearing him dubbed into English. (There are several Germans in the international co-production as well as Italians, French and Americans.)

While it is true that there’s lots of dubbing in the Italian version, starting with the American stars, it sounds on the whole more natural. Although the English dubbing in Paramount’s restored version is about as good as dubbing gets, this “1900” retains inevitably an aura of artificiality and, as a result, invites stretches of tedium. (Significantly, the film’s politicking seems lots less heavy-handed filtered through subtitles.)

The belated release of Bertolucci’s cut of “1900” has also effected an entirely appropriate change of rating from R to NC-17, for also restored are some scenes of non-exploitative but nonetheless quite candid sex scenes. Note also that the complete film is being screened only on Saturday and Sunday, with only the first or second halves shown on weeknights.

Robert De Niro: Alfredo Berlinghieri

Gerard Depardieu: Olmo Dalco

Dominique: Sanda Ada

Burt Lancaster: Alfredo Berlinghieri I

Donald Sutherland: Attila

Sterling Hayden: Leo Dalco

Stefania Sandrelli: Anita Dalco

Alida Valli: Signora Pioppi

A Paramount release of a P.E.A. Produzioni Europe Associate, Roma. Director Bernardo Bertolucci. Alberto Grimaldi. Screenplay by Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. Editor Arcalli. Costumes Gitt Magrini. Music Ennio Morricone. Art director Ezio Frigerio.

Running time: 5 hours, 11 minutes (plus intermission).

MPAA-rated: NC-17 (no children younger than 17 admitted).

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Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novecento) – film review

1900 (1976)

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Cast: Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster

Runtime: 315 minutes

Format: 2 Blu-ray discs

Available now

Louder Than War’s Jamie Havlin takes a look at a gargantuan cinematic saga from Italian master director Bernardo Bertolucci.

I’m currently re-reading Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, a book with a few pages on Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, a film snapped up by Miramax for distribution in North America. Miramax bigwig Harvey Weinstein wanted to drastically cut the movie but Bertolucci, who was perfectly happy with the length of his work, had wisely insisted on having the final cut in his contract. Weinstein, infamously nicknamed Harvey Scissorhands due to his habit of having films edited down for the sake of commercial viability, said later: ‘I couldn’t get Bernardo to cut his hair, much less a frame of his film.’

Bertolucci had faced even greater concerns with his epic, 1900. At one point during post-production, he was even banned from the editing room by producer Alberto Grimaldi and he later slammed the 195 minute cut shown in the States as ‘a travesty’.

1900 has existed in a number of versions, the director’s favourite and the one presented here by Eureka! being the longest, stretching to a marathon five hours and fifteen minutes (divided into two acts on two separate discs). Originally envisioned as a six part series for Italian TV, the shoot itself lasted over forty weeks and it’s little wonder then that legendary critic Pauline Kael claimed 1900 made most other films ‘look like something you hold up on the end of a toothpick.’

Boiling down the plot for you, 1900 is the intertwined tale of two childhood friends, both born on the same day early in the century, from their births through five decades of often fierce class struggle in Italy.

One, Alfredo Berlinghieri (De Niro), is born to a family of wealthy landowners, the other, Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu) to peasants who work for Berlinghieri’s family, but despite hailing from opposing ends of the social spectrum, the boys bond over frog hunting, masturbation and laying down on a railway line while trains hurtle towards them. It is though a complex friendship and one where a degree of enmity will always exist.

Alfredo returns from fighting in the First World War to find a new foreman, Attila Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland) in charge of the workers on his father’s plantation. Not only does this character’s first name raise alarm bells (Attila by name, Attila by nature) but he is also a leading local fascist, whose idea of showing off to his blackshirted pals is to tie a cat to a post and head-butt it to its death.

1900 is far from subtle and the director clearly sides with the workers in the film so don’t bother hoping to discover any redeeming qualities in Mellanchini, in fact, his behavior only deteriorates into greater levels of sadism as Mussolini’s party gains control of the Italian parliament.

At times dazzling, it’s a shame that 1900 fails to sustain its interest throughout. The trial scene at the end quickly descends into didactic propaganda and drags on horribly, interspersed with irritating bursts of accordian music after each badly dubbed accusation against the ‘padrone’ Alfredo, although a group of peasants parading under a gigantic, red Soviet patchwork flag is at least visually inventive.

Bertolucci was a communist himself, although nowadays he believes that particular ideology is dead, reflecting in a Guardian interview in 2013 that: ‘I lived in a kind of dream of communism.’

Sadly, the final dialogue free sequence, set some time after 1945 is one of cinema’s dampest ever squibs. The two protagonists still squabbling should suggest that the class struggle continues but I couldn’t help but be reminded of the two not entirely convincing old men, Jack and Victor, from Glasgow based sitcom Still Game.

And don’t ask me about the mole that burrows out from underneath the earth!

Certain scenes will, though, undoubtedly stick in the mind: the slaying and flaying of a pig by Olmo; a peasant Van Goghing his ear; Alfredo snorting a line of cocaine and not feeling anything and – still on the subject of cocaine – a white horse with that name trotting into Alfredo’s wedding reception where it is presented to his new wife, Ada Chiostri Polan (Dominique Sanda). There’s also a section where the two young men share a bed with an epileptic prostitute that’s initially funny and then deeply disturbing.

There are some superb acting on display too. Going into the film, De Niro had just delivered a trio of performances that could match any run of roles by any actor at any point in the history of cinema – namely Johnny Boy Civello in Mean Streets, the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Here though, he is eclipsed by Depardieu and Sutherland (although the ageing of the latter failed to convince, his forehead being too high and too smooth to be realistic). The young actors are both impressive and the two grandfathers from the first half of the film, Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden, also shine.

Also worth mentioning is the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, which is consistently wonderful and Ennio Morricone’s score which, while not being his absolutely finest work, is in places a joy.

Is the film too long? Well, although I tend to side with the vision of a director over the moneymen, on this occasion I would have to answer yes, and if given the choice to watch it again I would likely choose one of the shorter versions although I am glad to have finally watched the saga the way the director intended it to be seen.

Extras include two video pieces featuring Bertolucci and an hour-long on-set documentary about the making of 1900 as well as a booklet featuring a couple of interviews with Bertolucci, archival imagery, and more.

For more on the film visit the official Eureka! Masters of Cinema website here .

All words by Jamie Havlin. More writing by Jamie can be found at his Louder Than War author’s archive . You can also find Jamie on Twitter as @MalcontentsOnly .

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• Film Reference
• Films No-Or

1900 - Film (Movie) Plot and Review

(Novecento)

Italy, 1976

Director: Bernardo Bertolucci

Production: TCF, PEA, Artistes Associés, and Artemis Productions; Technicolor, 35mm; running time: originally 320 minutes, US version is 245 minutes, usually shown in two parts. Released Cannes Film Festival, 1976.

Producer: Alberto Grimaldi; screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, and Giuseppe Bertolucci; photography: Vittorio Stovaro; editor: Franco Arcalli; art director: Enzo Frigiero; music: Ennio Morricone.

Cast: Robert De Niro ( Alfredo, the grandson ); Burt Lancaster ( Alfredo, the grandfather ); Romolo Valli ( Giovanni ); Anna-Marie Gherardi ( Eleonora ); Laura Betti ( Regina ); Paolo Pavesi ( Alfredo, as a child ); Dominique Sanda ( Ada ); Sterling Hayden ( Leo Dalco ); Gérard Depardieu ( Olmo Dalco ); Roberto Maccanti ( Olmo, as a child ); Stefania Sandrelli ( Anita Foschi ); Donald Sutherland ( Attila ); Werner Bruhns ( Octavio ); Alida Valli ( Signora Pioppi ); Francesca Bertini ( Sister Desolata ).

Publications

Bertolucci, Bernardo, and others, 1900 , Turin, 1976.

Casetti, F., Bertolucci , Florence, 1975.

Hunter, Allan, Burt Lancaster: The Man and His Movies , New York, 1980; Edinburgh, 1984.

Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich, and others, Bernardo Bertolucci , Munich, 1982.

Ungari, Enzo, Bertolucci , Milan, 1982.

Kolker, Robert Phillip, Bernardo Bertolucci , London, 1985.

Cameron-Wilson, James, The Cinema of Robert De Niro , London, 1986.

Lacombe, Roland, Burt Lancaster , Paris, 1987.

Kline, T. Jefferson, Bertolucci's Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Cinema , Amherst, Massachusetts, 1987.

Tonetti, Claretta, Bernardo Bertolucci , New York, 1995.

" 1900 Issue" of Filmcritica (Rome), July 1976.

Le Puyat, S., and M. Olmi, in Téléciné (Paris), October 1976.

Bickley, D., and others, in Cinéaste (Paris), Winter 1976–77.

Elbert, L., in Cinemateca Revista (Montevideo), 1976–77.

Gilbert, B., "Bertolucci's 1900 : Stormy Beginnings," in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), January 1977.

Schepelern, P. in Kosmorama (Copenhagen), Spring 1977.

Alemanno, R., in Cinema Nuovo (Bari), March-April 1977. Filmfaust (Frankfurt), April-May 1977.

Netzeband, G., in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), June 1977.

di Bernardo G., interview with Bernardo Bertolucci, in Skrien (Amsterdam), July-August 1977.

De Vico, F., and R. Degni, "Bertolucci: Interview 2," in Skrien (Amsterdam), September 1977.

Canby, Vincent, in New York Times , 8 October 1977.

Cornand, A., in Image et Son (Paris), November 1977.

Young, D., "History Lessons," in Film Comment (New York), November-December 1977.

Quart, Leonard, " 1900 : Bertolucci's Marxist Opera," in Cineaste (New York), Winter 1977–78.

Erikson, S., in Filmavisa (Oslo), no. 1–2, 1978.

Sevensson, A., in Filmrutan (Stockholm), no. 1, 1978.

Paret, R., in Cinéma Québec (Montreal), no. 4–5, 1978.

Dean, D., in Films in Review (New York), January 1978.

Forbes, Jill, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), January 1978.

Aitken, W., in Take One (Montreal), March 1978.

Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, in Sight and Sound (London), Spring 1978.

Gow, Gordon, in Films and Filming (London), April 1978.

Karaganov, A., "Vom Monolog sum Epos," in Film und Fernsehen (Berlin), April 1978.

Arbasino, A., in Cine (Mexico City), May 1979.

Horton, A., "History as Myth and Myth as History in Bertolucci's 1900 ," in Film and History (Newark, New Jersey), February 1980.

Firas, I. Leon, in Hablemos de Cine (Lima), November 1980.

Filmcritica (Rome), October-November 1984.

Burgoyne, Robert, "The Somatization of History in Bertolucci's 1900 ," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Autumn 1986.

Burgoyne, Robert, "Temporality as Historical Background in Bertolucci's 1900 ," in Cinema Journal (Austin), Spring 1989.

Alion, Yves, "[ Novecento ] 1900 ," in Mensuel du Cinéma , July-August 1993.

Castoro Cinema , November/December 1995.

Jenkens, E., "Charivari Rituals and the 'Revoltist Tradition," in 1900 ," in Cinefocus (Bloomington, Indiana), vol. 4, 1996.

Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (Novecento) is an attempt at a "popular," accessible film presenting the complexities of the social and political history of Italy between 1901 and 1945, specifically in the region twenty miles from Parma, where the director was born and brought up. It exists in two versions—an original Italian-language epic, five and half hours long, and an abridged English and French version, 75 minutes shorter and often shown in two parts, which is what most viewers have seen. In either version the central themes of this epic film are the same: the local struggle between the peasants and the feudal landowners and, on the national and local levels alike, the rise and fall of Fascism. In taking on such an ambitious set of themes Bertolucci raises high expectations; unfortunately, he does not fulfill them.

The structure of 1900 is premised on a flashback from the opening scene—set on Liberation Day, 25 April 1945—telling the story of a friendship spanning forty years between Alfredo (Robert De Niro), from the landowning class and Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), from the peasantry, both born on 27 January 1901, the day (as we are told in the film) that the great Italian operatic composer Guiseppe Verdi died. The date presumably symbolises the end of the 19th century, but it also hints that the film is to be seen as within the tradition inaugurated by Verdi's tragic operas. The first part of the film, dealing with the relations between the two boys' families, unfolds against the background of a major peasant revolt in 1908, which includes Alfredo's grandfather, the padrone Berlinghieri (Burt Lancaster), among its targets; the First World War, in which Alfredo and Olmo both fight; and their witnessing of the beginnings of Fascism. Although Alfredo is shown to be sympathetic to the poor and degraded peasants, he follows the destiny of his class, while Olmo's slow development of political consciousness does not go so far as to affect their friendship. In this part Bertolucci's depiction of the peasantry, though it is said to have been largely based on memories of his own years as a middle-class child in a rural setting, is highly romanticised, with the spectacular cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, especially his long shots of the wheat fields, enhancing the picturesqueness of rural life while, ironically, cutting some of the ground from under the seriousness of the peasants' protests against their exploitation.

In the second part of the film the change in the political climate is symbolised by the wintry setting of the opening scene: the Fascist march on Rome (in 1922) has already taken place and the Berlinghieris' steward Attila (Donald Sutherland) has become head of the Black Shirts in the area. Bertolucci here uses colour and lighting effectively for atmosphere, with bright reds and yellows for the peasants and workers and darker hues for the Fascists, but the suspicion that this is simplistic and manipulative is reinforced by the presentation of the main Fascist characters, Attila and his wife Regina, as sexual sadists hungering for power. One example of this sadism is when Attlia enjoys killing a cat by smashing its head against a post. This equation of Fascism with purely individual sadism serves only to present it as a psychological manifestation, when in fact it was (and still is) a highly developed, complex and subtle ideology, and all the more dangerous because of these features. Bertolucci's caricatures, though no doubt well-meant, only undermine his attack on Fascism and what it represents.

If the peasants are portrayed as little more than figures in a landscape, and the Fascists as figures out of horror comics, what of the central figures of Alfredo and Olmo? Alfredo marries a wealthy girl while Olmo marries a politically radical school teacher and becomes involved with politicising the peasants. After the death of his father, Alfredo becomes the padrone and suffers a disintegrating relationship with his wife Ada (Dominique Sanda), who has become an alcoholic. Although fundamentally a liberal, Alfredo is too weak to resist the influence of Attila and thus slowly distances himself with Olmo. The story comes full circle and recounts events on Liberation Day and after, as the victims of Fascism seek revenge. In these sections we are at least presented with plausible human beings, whose emotions are mixed, whose characters develop over time and whose views cannot be reduced to slogans; yet their plausibility, well-served by the work of the principal actors, functions in a vacuum, since the external events which influence their lives are so sketchily conveyed and the other characters they deal with are so fundamentally implausible.

In short, in either of its two versions, 1900 is a fatally disjointed work. Foreground and background do not fit together; landscapes and sets threaten at times to swamp the human stories being told; epic detachment alternates with intimate narrative, psychological melodrama with broadbrush social history. It is not surprising that the Italian Communist Party, which at that time Bertolucci sympathised with, criticised the film's historical inaccuracies and ideological inconsistencies, as did many other Italian critics and groups. The party's specific criticism—that Bertolucci shows, in the scene of Alfredo's trial, an event that never happened—produced the revealing response that this scene was a fantasy. Yet nothing in the film itself indicates this—which suggests, as do the romanticisation of the peasants, the simplification of Fascism and the alternation between sympathy for Alfredo and sympathy for Olmo, that at the heart of the film is the director's own political confusion. 1900 particularly suffers by comparison with Bertolucci's earlier attempt to depict the Fascist era, The Conformist . Perhaps because of the discipline imposed by relying on a single literary source (Alberto Moravia's novel), perhaps because the story is small-scale and yet complex, the earlier film can make viewers ask themselves what they might have done under Fascism, while watching 1900 makes them ask what Bertolucci really thinks Fascism was about.

In 1900 , the first of Bertolucci's series of historically based epics, he evidently bit off more than he, or his audience, could chew. For all its visual beauty, its frequent scenes of convincing and moving personal drama and its occasional moments of well-composed and exciting political narrative, 1900 is ultimately disappointing, an incoherent and frustrating film unworthy of the cast and crew involved in its making.

—Monique Lamontagne

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(LL, VVV, SSS, NNN, A, H, AB, M) Numerous obscenities and profanities; extreme graphic violence (pitch-fork and knife stabbing, man's ear cut off); graphic promiscuity and sexual immorality; female and male genital nudity; alcohol abuse (naked woman has epileptic seizure after drinking alcohol); humanism and socialism; and, inhumane treatment of animals (a cat is strapped to a board with a thick belt and whacked to a bloody pulp).

More Detail:

This pitchfork-stabbing, noose-hanging, frequently naked, multiple-sex-partner, Marxist diatribe is rated NC-17, a disguise label for this 4 hour X-travaganza, innocuously titled 1900. Although this re-release of the movie that brought together the talents of three major studios (Paramount, United Artists and Twentieth Century Fox) includes X-rated footage that was cut when 1900 was first released in 1976, most filmgoers will still find this two-part epic too long, tedious and boring as well as downright repulsive.

The story takes place around Parma, a medium sized city in north central Italy, which director Bertolucci uses as a microcosm for all of Italy in the 20th Century. It begins in April, 1945, with Italy’s “liberation” from Fascism (although their are those who argue that Italy wanted the Fascists, and it was that party which united the country). While a group of enraged peasants stab pitchforks into a Fascist couple who are trying to flee the country, a young boy takes a wealthy landowner, Alfredo Berlinghieri, captive with a rifle he has just acquired.

As Alfredo informs the boy that his grandfather died in the cow barn where they stand, the movie dissolves back to the day Verdi died January, 1901. This auspicious day also sees the birth of Alfredo Berlinghieri and Olmo Dalco whose lives we follow for the rest of the film. Alfredo Berlinghieri is named after his domineering grandfather (played by Burt Lancaster). Olmo is the illegitimate grandson of Leo Dalco (played by Sterling Hayden), the peasant who manages the Berlinghieri farm. While Grandpa Berlinghieri regrets that he can no longer give orders with the necessary authority, Dalco and the peasants contemplate the promises of socialism.

Becoming friends, the rebellious Olmo dares Alfredo to test his courage by lying down on a railroad track as the train passes over them. With Olmo lying vertically in the middle of the track, arms tightly crossed over his chest, he survives the courage test. Alfredo, on the other hand, refuses to participate until a few years later.

To reassert his manhood, Grandpa Berlinghieri asks a young peasant girl to fondle his genitals. Coyly, she slips her hand into his pants, saying, “but Sir, you know you can’t milk a bull.” This indignation is too much, so Grandpa Berlinghieri hangs himself inside the barn.

Upon his death, his son, Giovanni, falsifies Grandpa’s will. Giovanni props the elder Alfredo up in a bed and imitate his voice, as if he were dictating the will from his deathbed. Young Alfredo, however, rushes into the room and throws the covers off the maimed, blood-scarred corpse.

Later, as the boys play in a loft, comparing genitals at one point, a hailstorm destroys the crops. When Giovanni tells the farmhands they will have to take a cut in pay, they balk. When he asks them if they have ears, one peasant slices off his own ear and hands it to Giovanni.

Seven years later, the farmhands finally strike against the landowners. Leo Dalco dies as the aristocrats comically attempt to work the fields. Enraged by the injustice of this Fascist feudalism, Olmo runs away and joins the Army.

World War I passes. Olmo (played by Gerard Depardieu) returns home and falls in love with a Communist school teacher, Anita Foschi, who has been displaced by the war. He embraces communism and organizes a peasant union.

For recreation, Alfredo, who has become a fop and a wimp, and Olmo go to a nearby village and are propositioned by a peasant girl. Stripping, they jump into bed on either side of her. After drinking some wine, she goes into a naked epileptic seizure. Alfredo and Olmo leave her in disgust. To shake off this unpleasant event, Olmo finds his common law wife, Anita, who is pregnant with his child, and just outside her classroom sticks his head under her skirt to engage in cunnilingus.

Thus, 1900 meanders along from one event to another. Fornication punctuates a barren landscape of dialectical events. The landowners repress the peasants; the peasants react; history moves forward. God is absent from 1900, and the church is merely a backdrop for the senseless action.

Eventually, Alfredo inherits the family property and marries a girl named Sandra. Olmo’s wife dies during childbirth. Time passes, at the end of World War II, Olmo, the Communist partisan leader, returns to oversee the trial of Alfredo, who is permitted to stay alive.

With the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe, 1900 makes less sense now than when Bernardo Bertolucci, an avowed Communist, wrote, directed and edited it. (It is interesting to note that Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden were both card-carrying Communists. Hayden even left the United States for several years in protest of our system of government.) Devoid of spiritual elements, 1900 is a monotonous ode to dialectical materialism, the organizing system of Marxist thought which advocates contradiction, avows atheism, lauds deceit, and insists on historical inevitability. Even the sexual excess follows Marx’s absurd command to abolish all morality.

Of course, contrary to the trumpeted inevitability of socialism, God intervened in history and proved the Communists and their cousins, the National Socialists, wrong. Paramount Pictures should have taken this into account when they were contemplating the rerelease of this heavy-handed piece of archaic propaganda.

Even secular critics have complained that there is too much pulpit pounding and political theorizing in the script, which works against the grandeur of the theme and flattens any complexity which might have enhanced the story. Furthermore, the horrendous number of objectionable elements (such as numerous obscenities and profanities, extreme graphic violence (pitch-fork and knife stabbing, man’s ear cut off), graphic promiscuity and sexual immorality, female and male total nudity (at least six pornographic scenes), alcohol abuse (naked woman has epileptic seizure after drinking alcohol), humanism and socialism, and, inhumane treatment of animals (a cat is strapped to a board with a thick belt and whacked to a bloody pulp)) degrades the beautiful cinematography and undermines the magnificent musical score. Even excellent acting can’t lift this heavy-handed political tract out of the dustbin of history.

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1900 Reviews

• 70   Metascore
• 5 hr 45 mins
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Director Bernardo Bertolucci's epic detailing Italy's social and political progress. Burt Lancaster, Gerard Depardieu, Robert De Niro, Sterling Hayden, Donald Sutherland, Dominique Sanda.

Reviewed By: Michael Costello

Bernardo Bertolucci's massive epic, a history of Italy from 1900 to 1945 as reflected through the friendship of two men across class lines, is one of the most fascinating, if little seen, of his films. After beginning with Robert De Niro as wealthy landowner Alfredo, and Gérard Depardieu as labor leader Olmo, the film returns to 1901 with the death of composer Giuseppe Verdi and the birth of the two friends. The opposing class interests of their grandfathers, padrone Alfredo Berlinghieri (Burt Lancaster), and laborer Leo Dalco (Sterling Hayden), is quickly established in the enmity between the characters. The director is graphic in his depiction of ownership as exploitation, and makes the craggy Hayden character a figure of nearly Biblical proportions as he rouses his fellow workers to maintain solidarity and demand self-determination. As they grow, the boys become friends, mystified by the tensions that separate their families. But as time passes and Alfredo assumes the role of padrone, while Olmo works the land, their relationship becomes strained. With the rise of fascism, the director spells out its complicity with business interests, as the diffident Alfredo falls under the spell of a vicious and degraded fascist farm manager played by Donald Sutherland. Bertolucci, as he has in The Conformist (1970) and The Last Emperor (1987), brilliantly uses characterization to imply and contrast the crippling emotional effects of wealth and power. At over five hours in the restored version, the stately film has a kind of cumulative power now rare on the screen. In fairness, parts of the film's second half lack some the richness of the earlier sections, and a number of simple, almost uninflected scenes, seem excessively didactic, even for a leftist polemic. Among the large cast, the two leads are exceptional, with De Niro evincing an unusual vulnerability. Sutherland gives a disturbingly brilliant performance, and Lancaster is also memorable as the stern landowner. Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's longtime collaborator, and one of the greatest of cinematographers, produces images of breathtaking beauty, so much so that the rapturous shots of the vast fields almost make one forget the oppression of the workers. One comes away from this majestic undertaking with a sense of wonder, and awareness that it's not likely to be replicated any time soon.

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FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; How to Lose Your Mooring but Remain Immobile

By Stephen Holden

• Oct. 29, 1999

As he demonstrated a decade ago with his semi-autobiographical film, ''Cinema Paradiso,'' Giuseppe Tornatore can be awfully good at plucking nostalgic heartstrings. And in his first English-language film, ''The Legend of 1900,'' the Italian director has created a lavish, poetically ambitious period piece, drenched in romantic atmosphere that wants to tap into our tear ducts while aspiring to be the thinking man's ''Titanic.'' But to be the thinking man's anything requires some serious thought. And this solemn, ersatz epic not only misses the boat intellectually but also fails as entertainment.

A two-hour cinematic fable based on a dramatic monologue by Alessandro Baricco, ''The Legend of 1900'' tells the story of a foundling, discovered aboard the Virginian, a trans-Atlantic steamer, in the year 1900, who becomes a jazz piano prodigy. Named after the year of his discovery and played by Tim Roth as a holy innocent whose wide Buster Keaton eyes gaze sadly out over the keyboard while he spins out his improvisations, the character has Allegorical Significance written all over him. Because he's a symbol (of exactly what is never made clear), we're not supposed to wonder how he learned to read, write and speak impeccable English, or how he acquired his expensive wardrobe without ever having left the ship.

The thing about fables, if we are to take them seriously, is that they have to mean something and the characters have to add up to more than question marks. But when Nineteen Hundred has his moment of truth and must decide whether to leave the ship on which he has spent his entire life to pursue his dream girl, his explanation for his reluctance is a pseudo-poetic mumbo-jumbo about beginnings and endings and his being able to hear (or not hear) ''the voice'' of the sea.

The movie might have been partly salvageable if Nineteen Hundred's music soared to the heights everyone claims it does. In the film's dramatic climax, Jelly Roll Morton (Clarence Williams 3d), who has heard rumors of Nineteen Hundred's genius, books a passage on the Virginian specifically to challenge him to a piano duel. But the piece (composed by Ennio Morricone) with which Nineteen Hundred defeats Morton is a whirling, twirling, fussy, ''Flight of the Bumblebee''-like finger-flying exhibition that has velocity but little coherence. It is no match artistically for Morton's propulsive meat-and-potatoes jazz. Much worse is the movie's dinky little theme song, a wistful piano fragment that characters tout as a Great Melody (something beyond Chopin or Gershwin); it comes to Nineteen Hundred as he falls hopelessly in love with a pretty third-class passenger (Melanie Thierry) while glimpsing her through a porthole. This, too, was composed by Mr. Morricone, who has done much more distinguished work, as in his score for ''Bugsy.'' Even Mr. Morricone's love theme from ''In the Line of Fire'' is more eloquent.

Weighing down the movie is a ponderous narration by Max (Pruitt Taylor Vince), a jazz trumpeter, who entrances a dealer of used musical instruments with the story of Nineteen Hundred.

''The Legend of 1900'' is at least gorgeous to look at. Lajos Koltai's cinematography bathes everything in a rich, golden light. In the most magical moment, the young Nineteen Hundred (Cory Buck) presses his nose against a stained-glass partition to observe the blurred images of whirling, formally attired ballroom dancers. Later, in a dizzying set piece, he unhooks the grand piano from its footing during a violent storm and plays the instrument as it careers wildly across the floor, eventually crashing through the stained glass. Watching ''The Legend of 1900'' is a little like coming upon a beautifully lighted, ornately framed painting in a museum and discovering on closer inspection that the picture itself is just a piece of kitsch.

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