1900 (Novecento)

"Never bite the hand that feeds you, as long as you need to be fed."

Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976) was a monumental act of hubris. Clocking in at 5 hours 16 minutes, it was butchered by distributors, released to mixed reviews and indifferent audiences, a colossal letdown after Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris proved an international smash. It's hard not to admire 1900, engrossing for all its preachy excess.
Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalco (Gerard Depardieu) are born simultaneously in 1901 to Italian landowners and peasants, respectively. Their childhood friendship's underscored by tensions between Alfredo's father Giovanni (Romolo Valli) and his workers. After World War I, Olmo becomes a Marxist, while Alfredo inherits the family estate, including fascist foreman Attila (Donald Sutherland). Their relationship grows strained, with Alfredo's wife Ada (Dominique Sanda) driving him to distraction while Olmo and Attila butt heads. After Mussolini falls, a reckoning's in order.
1900 has a luxuriant texture and craftsmanship more often associated with novels than cinema. Bertolucci employs a scope that Lean and Coppola could only dream about, covering 50 years and dozens of personages in engrossing detail. It's a Marxist national epic that pares agitprop with spectacle, a paean to mass action peppered with vivid characterizations. Periodic concessions to vulgarity lightly mar its high-flown pretensions.
Vittorio Storaro's photography lacks The Conformist's florid color scheme, instead employing painterly compositions and spellbinding long takes. Endless pastoral shots of Alfredo's estate give way to riotous imagery: a fog-shrouded showdown between Anita's (Stefania Sandrelli) socialists and mounted carabinieri, Alfredo and Ada's lavish wedding, a muddy massacre, Alfredo posing nobly against a Gone With the Wind-style sepia sunset, underscored by Ennio Morricone's ennobling music.
For many, 1900's politics are as trying as its length. Bertolucci contrasts the decadent Berlinghieris with the peasants, lice-ridden and starving in muddy hovels. Young Olmo catches a brace of frogs, which Alfredo's parents cook for dinner. Alfredo's senile grandfather (Burt Lancaster) putters around muttering profanities, Giovanni whines about his "sacrifices" while sister Regina (Laura Betti) becomes a cackling nutcase. Even Alfredo allows Attila to terrorize his workers, more concerned that he wipe his feet than not murder people.
Bertolucci lacks Luchino Visconti's sympathy for the passing aristocracy. 1900 ridicules the Berlinghieris, with the hunchbacked Rigoletto (Giacomo Rizzo) mocking the birth pangs of Alfredo's mother and Olmo's father (Sterling Hayden) refusing his wine. The peasants have a primal connection to the Earth that landowners can't grasp: they dance in the woods as the Berlinghieris fret about money. Alfredo values his friendship with Olmo but can't empathize with him, unable to transcend class barriers.
Bertolucci's edgier content serves the characters. Alfredo and Olmo have a threesome with a prostitute (Stefania Cassini) who suffers an epileptic fit, showcasing Olmo's sensitivity: he stays with her while Alfredo flees. Ada's an eccentric, chain-smoking bourgeois corrupted by wealth. She feigns blindness, flirts with Olmo and drinks heavily, disgusting even Regina. They're gifted a horse named Cocaine as a wedding present, spotlighting her degeneration as Alfredo's consort.
Naturally, 1900 presents fascism as national neurosis, an alliance between the criminal and moneyed classes. Giovanni raises money for the Blackshirts in a church decorated with dead animals. Attila commits every sin from cat-killing to pedophilia, yet he's more convincing than The Damned's Nazi jackals. He evolves from harmless oaf to psychopath, emboldened by a regime promoting order at any cost. He awaits the day when he can turn from Communists to aristocrats.
Oddly, 1900 unravels when it should grow most engaging. The second half covers the fascist era, but focuses too narrowly on Alfredo and Ada's marriage. Mussolini's regime is felt only through Attila's escalating atrocities. Bertolucci concludes with a postwar show trial, punctuated with comic accordions and ending with a copout. Peasants wave a giant red banner and Olmo lectures the audience about Communism, in case things weren't didactic enough.
Robert De Niro gives a fine performance, playing Alfredo as both weak and willful, too complacent to court change. Gerard Depardieu plays fiery indignation well, but Olmo's the most one-dimensional character. Donald Sutherland is a frightfully compelling monster, matched by Laura Betti's depraved Lady Macbeth turn. Stefania Sandrelli's fiery schoolteacher is tragically short-lived, while Dominique Sanda transitions from vividly sensual to impenetrable melancholy.
Less impressive are Burt Lancaster and Romolo Valli, whose presence evokes The Leopard without making new impressions. Sterling Hayden proves inspired casting; his vulgar crustiness makes for a wonderful peasant. Alida Valli and Maria Monti have less-developed roles. Werner Brunns plays Alfredo's playboy uncle who grows progressively disgusted with him.
1900's central image has Alfredo and Olmo, first as children and later as old men, laying under an oncoming train. It's a striking metaphor for history passing them by: Alfredo as a doomed aristocrat, Olmo whose socialist dreams shatter in postwar Italy. Such is Bertolucci's achievement that this seems a fitting visual for a nation's traumatic 20th Century.