Appalling bucolic melodrama. At over five hours long you'd expect some interesting characters? NO. Some historical insight? NO. One good scene that stood out like a palm in the desert? NO. The film begins with the death of Verdi and if being generous plays out like an opera buffa - but an awful one. Almost every character is a moron. Five hours of watching cretins make facile declamations and throw tantrums. I'm going to slap your face, then take a dump, then scream out the window la La LA, then get drunk, then have sex (with a pig), then chop my ear off, then write a poem blah blah blah. Why? Because I'm Italian (or French). So much emotion and so little intellect. An insult to Italian culture and history. De Niro, stoically puts in a good performance, as does Depardieu. One disjointed vignette follows another . . . endlessly. Why re-publish this dreck? I have the feeling that if all accumulated time wasted on making, watching and writing about this garbage were reappropriated, we would have cured cancer.

Rural Italy, early 1900s. Two boys, Alfredo and Olmo, are born on the same day - one to the owner of a large estate, the other to one of his labourers. There is a massive divide between the classes in Italy, to the point of antagonism. Despite this, and despite some disagreements along the way, Alfredo and Olmo become best friends. We see them grow up, go to WW1 and their adult lives. Eventually their different upbringings and social standings come back to haunt them, as Italy is plunged into class war - the Socialists (workers) vs the Fascists (supported by the middle- and upper-class). Alfredo and Olmo find themselves on opposite sides.Epic drama, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Epic is a bit of an understatement for this movie - the full version is over five hours long! (Mini-series in one part would be a better description!). Therein lies one of the problems with 1900 - while many of the scenes are important, you feel that a lot of it could have been edited out. Some scenes are just padding, and the writing within those scenes reinforces this view. The result is that watching the movie becomes an ordeal. The unbalanced approach to the class differences is also irritating. The land owners, and Fascist supporters, are all shown as unfeeling, monsters, while the peasants are all shown in a very sympathetic light, to the point that random acts of violence and killing by them are condoned. It's difficult to support people engage in such acts and/or who proclaim Stalin as their hero...Casting is also odd. There's, as you would expect, a large Italian cast but many of the main roles are filled by Hollywood stars - Robert De Niro, Burt Lancaster, Donald Sutherland, Sterling Hayden - dubbed into Italian! It would have made more sense to have Italian actors, speaking Italian. The lips and words not being in sync gives a cheap, B-grade feel to the movie.The basic plot was interesting, especially as you have the classic story of friends turned enemies through circumstances beyond their control, but this was ruined by the length of the movie and the pro- communist bias.

It's very difficult for me to understand the love for this film. It may, in fact, be one of the worst films I have ever seen. No character is really developed, despite the over 5 hour run time, and one of them, the Padrone DeNiro's wife, may be the single most annoying character ever set in a movie.Speaking of DeNiro, roughly 80% of his dialogue sounds like he doesn't really even care what he's saying. Poor Donald Sutherland was given the diabolical "Attila" role. It's pretty much a one note performance of evil and stupidity from beginning to end. Scenes are in the film which serve no purpose other than to bore the audience to tears, or in my case, make me cry from laughing. After a young boy is killed, the guests at a wedding run around in the scene immediately following as if they were in a Keystone cops movie. One of the lead characters is named Olmo, which was the basis for another film years later called St. Olmo's Fire. Oh wait, I meant he was the basis for a stupid Muppet on Sesame Street. There's a scene where a character gets his face stuffed with horse manure. That experience is very similar to watching this film. 1900 is simply another 1970's catastrophe along the lines of Heaven's Gate.

Set in Italy, the film follows the lives and interactions of two boys/men, one born of peasant stock (Depardieu), the other born to a land owner (deNiro). The drama spans from 1900 to about 1945, and focuses mainly on the rise of Fascism and the peasants' eventual reaction by supporting Communism, and how these events shape the destinies of the two main characters.This film excels as an epic, and must be commended for catching Robert DeNiro early enough in his career that he was able to sneak away for what could be called an art film, and then have nobody in America even notice that he did it.But also, that wonk scene... DeNiro and Depardieu? Forty years later, how do you live that down? They have both become huge stars, and Stefania Cassini has her own following, thanks in part to her role in "Suspiria".