Anniversary of the 1900
On May 21, 1976, Bernardo Bertolucci's movie "Novecento (1900)" premiered at the Cannes International Film Festival as part of an out-of-competition screening.
The full director's cut of the film has a duration of 5 hours and 17 minutes, making the film one of the longest commercial films in the history of cinema. According to Bertolucci, at first he planned to make a six-part film for television. But when developing the script, it came to the realization that for political, social, and narrative reasons, the film was more suited to the big screen.
When looking for funding for the film, Bernardo Bertolucci faced serious problems, as many film companies who got acquainted with the script considered it extremely pro-communist and even pro-Stalinist. Three American film companies - United Artists, Paramount Pictures and 20th Century Fox, which "chipped in" $ 2 million each, helped out. But the reason for the generosity was not ideological bias, but that American producers were impressed by the resounding financial success of Bernardo Bertolucci's previous film, "Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris)" which, with a budget of $ 1.25 million, grossed more than $ 96 million.
Friends of Bernardo Bertolucci - Italian communists - condemned the director for agreeing to accept money from the Americans. However, they also condemned Bertolucci for the huge, in their opinion, the number of red flags in the film.
For the role of Anita Furlan, Bernardo Bertolucci initially assumed Maria Schneider, but due to the hard differences that arose between the actress and the director during the filming of the movie "Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris)", Schneider was replaced by Stefania Sandrelli.
American film star Burt Lancaster was so eager to play in this film that he agreed to star without a fee, only to cover his transportation and living expenses.
The planned budget of $ 6 million was not enough because, firstly, the grand scale of the picture (even number of extras was more than 12 thousand people), and secondly, because of the excess duration of the shooting period of the picture: 14 months instead of 9. As a result, the budget grew to almost $ 10 million.
Following the urgent demands of film distributors and financiers to show the film to an international audience, Bertolucci was forced to reduce the length of the film to 3.5 hours, cutting out the most fiercely attacked by film critics explicit sex scenes and scenes of animal cruelty. At the same time, the film was divided into two parts. However, all this did not help to increase the audience's interest: many moviegoers left the cinema in the pause between the first and second parts. The full director's version was first shown in a movie theater in Belgrade, Serbia, on April 12, 2007, 31 years after its premiere.
Most film critics attacked Bertolucci's film with devastating reviews. The Anglo-Saxon critics were particularly furious. The main points of the charges brought against the film were its undisguised sympathy for socialism and its truly epic duration. There were such reviews:
"whether one takes the two-part movie as a glamorous epic or as a lengthy advertisement for the Italian communist party, it still looks like a major catastrophe."
Vincent Canby, a columnist for The New York Times, the mouthpiece of the US Democratic Party, wrote:
“1900,” which is essentially a Marxist romance ... is not an uninteresting failure, but being a failure, it looks arrogant. ... It's a shapeless mass of film stock containing some brilliant moments and a lot more that are singularly uninspired."
Roger Ebert rated the film only two stars out of 4 and wrote in his review:
"1900" is a film out of control. A film conceived on such an epic scale that it just doesn't fit. A film in which Bertolucci struggles for hours to make his statement about the class struggle in Italy only to end on a note of throwaway goofiness."
But all these attacks on the film did not impress the Danish Film Critics Association, which, to its credit, recognized Bertolucci's film as the Best European Film of the Year and awarded it its Bodil Award. Other prestigious European film forums either ignored this Bertolucci's film, or did not dare to include it in their competition programs.
Interestingly, Soviet moviegoers were able to watch this openly pro-communist and anti-fascist film in cinemas only with the beginning of perestroika, i.e., ten years after its creation.
Moviegoers around the world highly appreciated the film by Bernardo Bertolucci "Novecento (1900)". 65% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film a rating of 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Bernardo Bertolucci's film "Novecento (1900)" according to FilmGourmand was 8.058, thanks to which it took 638th place in the Golden Thousand.
