I saw this movie many years ago on television. The imagery and the relationship amongst the characters was so interesting and involving I couldn't blink. This story evolves around the friendship of three men and a woman they each have loved. Life will teach us and destroy us, but our friendship will always endure.The three Italian men became friends during WWII. Although they remained friends they each took different career interests which led them to grow apart only to have their reunions spawn occasionally over the years. The woman friend is somewhat loose and not regarded favorably as a quality person, but rather as a tramp.The theme here is time. Time determines how life will have formed their personalities, goals and dreams. Unfortunately all their dreams fall short and facing each other afterward is anticlimactic and depressing.By the end we are left with a feeling of sadness, cynicism, but a true account of how friendship and familial relationships come and fade. Life will be most cruel to the ones who are eager and sincere and the others will float through easily and unaffectedly.This is a cinematic masterpiece. It's a shame no one has revived it yet.

Scenes just jump out at you. The three friends going down the steps as one of them describes Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and another breaks down and cries. The fantastic re-enactment of Felini's most famous scene. The game show in which the nerdy film teacher gets a film-related answer wrong on a technicality (shades of John Turturo in Quiz Show). The three friends looking over a fence in a freeze frame at the end... Their expression stuck in one final disapointment.

I saw this film as a 20 year old when it just came out in the 70ies and I was fascinated by its vision, humor and tragedy. Now I saw it again, more than 25 years later. Living so to speak at the other end of the plot (the story begins when the four protagonists are around 20 and it ends in their late 40ies) it does not look worn out a bit. The way life constructs and destroys friendship has not been mirrored more intensely in any other film I've ever seen.

Such a "the way we were" on the Italian way in this film of early 70's. The film shows a journey: a journey of three friends and a woman through dreams and defeats, from post-war period to italian economic miracle (during the sixties)."We would like to change the world, but the world has changed us" tells one of the protagonists. And that's all....!