After making Last Tango in Paris back in 1973, Italian Director Bernardo Bertolucci was prosecuted for obscenity, buffeted by public controversy and caught in a crossfire of critical overkill —pans on one side, panegyrics on the other. But at least he got his movie into the theaters.
Now Bertolucci, 36, has come in with 1900, one of the most eagerly awaited films of recent years, and already his troubles over Last Tango look like tiddlywinks. The new picture is a year late, $5 million over budget, and—with a running time of five hours, ten minutes —a full two hours beyond the contractual limit. Producer Alberto Grimaldi has forcibly taken it out of Bertolucci's hands. The U.S. distributor, Paramount, is balking at releasing it. The dispute has turned into a three-cornered fusillade of multimillion-dollar lawsuits. No wonder Bertolucci has been suffering of late from a series of psychosomatic ills that he calls "the 1900 syndrome."
Marxist Bias. "It's all Bertolucci's fault," said the dapper Grimaldi, 52, while on a visit to New York City last week. "I think Last Tango went to his head. He has become an egomaniac, a very sick man." Bertolucci, biting his knuckles in his Rome apartment, charged Grimaldi with censorship and, half seriously, with putting "a kind of curse on me—a macumba." In Hollywood a top film executive suggested that after the succès de scandale of Last Tango, the big studios probably invested in Bertolucci without scrutinizing his plans. (In addition to Paramount's U.S. investment, United Artists and 20th Century Fox have bought various foreign rights.) "It's a mess," said the executive, "in which blame can be shared by all the participants."
The film itself is an even more turbulent saga than the brouhaha surrounding it. Bertolucci uses the lives of two friends born on the same day in 1900 to trace the major social and political upheavals of 50 years of Italian life (a better English rendering of the title, Novecento, might be Twentieth Century). Bertolucci's bias is frankly Marxist. His scenario, set in the rural Po valley, celebrates the rise of the Communist movement among the peasants and its ordeal under decadent landowners and brutal Fascists. Is this waving of the Red flag the real reason for the movie's rejection? Nobody will say so outright, but it is no secret that privately some Paramount executives are appalled by it. Says one: "The last half-hour of the film is a gigantic May Day rally."
Publicly, however, the epic length of 1900 is the major sticking point. Bertolucci took a year to shoot it, and expenditures zoomed from the budgeted $3 million to $8 million. Grimaldi says he protested but did not want to risk offending the Communist sympathies of the film crew and Italian workers in general. Says he: "If I had tried to stop production I would have had a terrible mess —riots, maybe." Bertolucci's first cut, which ran five hours, 30 minutes, was shown at last year's Cannes festival, with extremely mixed reactions. He trimmed another 20 minutes, and the film was released to European countries in two installments.