Bernardo Bertolucci devised 1900 to rival Luchino Visconti's The Leopard as the Italian national epic. Filmed over 10 months in the Emilia-Romagna countryside around Parma, it boasted a stellar international cast and was then the most expensive picture produced on the peninsula. However, Paramount insisted on reducing its original 320-minute running time to 247 minutes and the film was invariably shown in two parts, making it something of an endurance test for critics and audiences alike. Consequently, it met with a mixed reception on its initial release and only later developed a cult following that reinforced those isolated insistences that it was an instant classic.
In many ways, it was a companion piece to Bertolucci’s Before The Revolution, as for all the Marxist triumphalism of its postwar sequences, Bertolucci was fully aware that he was anticipating rather than celebrating the final demise of the padrone, who managed to survive the fall of Fascism, just as Alfredo escaped the punishment meted out to Attila.
Thus, Bertolucci indulged himself in a little political theorising in the second half of the action, which lacked the dramatic drive of the opening segment, as it followed the fates of Alfredo and Olmo from their birth on 27 January 1901 (the day Verdi died), through the agrarian riots of 1908, the Great War, the rise of Fascism, the victory of the Partisans and the collapse of the Salo Republic.
As ever with Bertolucci, the story bears autobiographical traces, with Alfredo and Olmo striking some as a `divided hero' whose contrasting traits represented the director's own conflicted opinions - hence his tendency to romanticise the peasant experience (with Vittorio Storaro's photography in the prewar phases owing much to the 19th-century Macchiaiuoli school of rural painting), while neglecting to condemn Alfredo for the complacency that enabled Fascism to take root.
But while he clearly admired Gérard Depardieu's feisty decency, Bertolucci was also so begrudgingly drawn to Robert De Niro's mannered passivity that he almost allowed this unusually ineffective performance to undermine the entire picture. Fortunately, its scope, scale and ambition ensured that it emerged as a flawed masterpiece.