1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)

1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976)

Cast: Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Dominique Sanda, Laura Betti, Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Stefania Sandrelli, Alida Valli, Romolo Valli, Paolo Pavesi, Roberto Maccanti. Screenplay: Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci. Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro. Production design: Maria Paola Maino, Gianni Quaranta. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Ennio Morricone.

In his attempt at an epic, Bernardo Bertolucci gives us many new and arresting things, but none perhaps more startling -- and ultimately more fatal to the film -- than Robert De Niro playing a passive weakling. The actor known for such aggressors as young Vito Corleone, for Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, even Rupert Pupkin, seems crucially miscast as the padrone of an Italian estate who can't bring himself to take sides in the conflict between communists and fascists. The De Niro smirk is still there, but it doesn't seem to fit on the face of Alfredo Berlinghieri, who waffles even when his best friend, his boyhood companion Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu), is threatened by the fascist overseer Attila Mellanchini, played -- not to say overplayed -- by Donald Sutherland. Bertolucci crafts a relationship between Alfredo and Olmo that goes beyond bromance and somehow persists for a lifetime. They are nominally twins, born on the same day in 1901 as the legitimate son of the landowner and the bastard of a peasant on his estate. The film begins with the end of World War II and the routing of the fascists, then flashes back to their birth and boyhood, skips ahead to the end of World War I, the rise and fall of fascism, and concludes with a coda in which the elderly Alfredo and Olmo are still roughhousing. It's meant to be a capsule version of the 20th century -- the original Italian title, Novecento, means "nineteen hundreds." The film is never unwatchable, but its epic ambitions are undone, I think, by Bertolucci's instinct for melodrama at the expense of characterization. The villains, Attila and his companion Regina (Laura Betti), go so far over the top in their evil-doing -- Attila casually kills a small boy with the same coolness with which he slaughters a cat earlier in the film -- that they become almost comic. It's a striking turn in the wrong direction for the director who earlier gave us a subtly intricate look at the character of a fascist with Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance in The Conformist (1970). There are colorful cameos by Burt Lancaster and Sterling Hayden to be savored, and Vittorio Storaro's cinematography and Ennio Morricone's score help the film immeasurably, but the main impression left by 1900 is of a director who overreached himself. 

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now

Capt. Willard: Martin Sheen
Col. Kurtz: Marlon Brando
Lt. Col. Kilgore: Robert Duvall
Jay "Chef" Hicks: Frederic Forrest
Lance B. Johnson: Sam Bottoms
Tyrone "Clean" Miller: Laurence Fishburne
Chief Phillips: Albert Hall
Col Lucas: Harrison Ford
Photojournalist: Dennis Hopper

Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay: John Milius, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Herr
Based on a novel by Joseph Conrad
Cinematography: Vittorio Storaro
Production design: Dean Tavoularis
Film editing: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald B. Greenberg, Walter Murch

The familiar story of the confused and sometimes disastrous making of Apocalypse Now has been told many times, and never better than by Francis Ford Coppola's wife, Eleanor, in her 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. So it's not worth going into here, except to note that the subtitle of her film plays on both the current meaning of the word "apocalypse" -- i.e., a disaster of great magnitude -- and the original one: a disclosure or revelation. It might be said that the enormous expenditure and hardship that Francis Coppola experienced during the making of Apocalypse Now was revelatory, not only to Coppola but also to the film industry, which was reaching the limits of its tolerance of unconstrained visionary filmmaking. It would cross that limit the following year with Heaven's Gate, Michael Cimino's film that took down a venerable production force, United Artists, along with its director. Coppola's career, unlike Cimino's, would recover, but he would never again be the director he was in his prime, with the first two Godfather films. And American filmmaking would never again be as prone to take risks as it was in the 1970s. As for the film itself, Apocalypse Now remains one of the essential American movies if only because it epitomizes the nightmare that was the Vietnam War. Coppola deserves much of the credit for this embodiment of Lord Acton's familiar dictum: "Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." But there are others who should share the credit with him, including screenwriters John Milius and Michael Herr, who made the connection between Joseph Conrad's tale of imperialism gone wrong, Heart of Darkness, and the war. The ambience of the film is largely the work of production designer Dean Tavoularis, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won a well-deserved Oscar, and Walter Murch and his sound team, who also won. And while Marlon Brando's Kurtz is a disappointment and Martin Sheen never quite meets the demands of his role as Capt. Willard, they are surrounded by marvelous support from Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Dennis Hopper, and a very young and almost unrecognizable Laurence Fishburne (billed as Larry), among others.

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

Of all the hyphenated Jeans, Jean-Louis Trintignant seems to me the most interesting. He doesn't have the lawless sex appeal of Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he didn't grow up on screen in Truffaut films like Jean-Pierre Léaud, but his career has been marked by exceptional performances of characters under great internal pressure. From the young husband cuckolded by Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956) and the mousy law student in whom Vittorio Gassman tries to instill some joie de vivre in Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi, 1962), through the dogged but eventually frustrated investigator in Z (Costa-Gavras, 1969) and the Catholic intellectual who spends a chaste night with a beautiful woman in My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969), to the guilt-ridden retired judge in Three Colors: Red (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1994) and the duty-bound caregiver to an aged wife in Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012), Trintignant has compiled more than 60 years of great performances. His most popular film, A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966), is probably his least characteristic role: a romantic lead as a race-car driver, opposite Anouk Aimée. His role in The Conformist, one of his best performances, is more typical: the severely repressed Fascist spy, Marcello Clerici, who is sent to assassinate his old anti-Fascist professor (Enzo Tarascio). Marcello's desire to be "normal" is rooted in his consciousness of having been born to wealth but to parents who have abused it to the point of decadence, with the result that he becomes a Fascist and marries a beautiful but vulgar bourgeoise (Stefania Sandrelli). Bertolucci's screenplay places a heavier emphasis on Marcello's repression of homosexual desire than does its source, a novel by Alberto Moravia. In both novel and film, the young Marcello is nearly raped by the chauffeur, Lino (Pierre Clémenti), whom Marcello shoots and then flees. But in the film, Lino survives to be discovered by Marcello years later on the streets the night of Mussolini's fall. Marcello, whose conformity does an about-face, sics the mob on Lino by pointing him out as a Fascist, and in the last scene we see him in the company of a young male prostitute. This equating of gayness with corruption is offensive and trite, but very much of its era. Even the sumptuous production -- cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, design by Ferdinando Scarfiotti, music by Georges Delerue -- doesn't overwhelm the presence of Trintignant's intensely repressed Marcello, with his stiff, abrupt movements and his tightly controlled stance and walk. If The Conformist is a great film, much of its greatness comes from Trintignant's performance.