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Paramount, now disenchanted, offered to stand aside if Grimaldi could find another U.S. distributor. Fox jumped in with an offer based on the premise that Bertolucci would chop the film to four hours. When Grimaldi found in February that Bertolucci's compromise effort was still going to run four hours, 25 minutes, he shut down the project and seized the film.
With the aid of an anonymous American film editor, Grimaldi then made his own three-hour, 15-minute cut in an attempt to comply with the Paramount contract. Bertolucci notified Paramount: "I disown any version of 1900 that is not edited by me." Meanwhile, the director got a moral boost when many prominent U.S. film critics signed a statement deploring Grimaldi's tactics and quite rightly arguing that "American moviegoers should have the opportunity to view the version approved by Bertolucci."
That five-hour version, dubbed in English, was screened for TIME'S Christopher Porterfield by Grimaldi last week. It shows Bertolucci operating at the full power of his lush, extravagant style. His composition, his expressive use of light and color, his fluid camera movement are all brilliant, especially in the ravishing pastoral sequences of peasants working, eating, dancing. Dramatically Bertolucci yields to operatic exaggerations, and he includes some unflinching scenes of sex and lurid violence. But he propels the viewer past many a grim or overblown moment with surging energy and passion.
The trouble is that Bertolucci the artist, no matter how impressive, remains at the service of Bertolucci the propagandist. The characters—played by such stars as Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Dominique Sanda and Gerard Depardieu—tend to evolve along party lines. Ultimately the spontaneity of the story is stifled by simplistic abstractions and soapbox oratory.
Best Hope. Nevertheless, Grimaldi's shortened and ideologically chastened version—also screened for TIME last week—only makes things worse. Transitions bump and jar; whole speeches and scenes flash by without motivation. Bertolucci's seasonal motifs—summer for his leading characters' youth, fall for the Fascist period, winter for the war and spring for the liberation—are thrown out of proportion, and the artful echoes and symmetries of his narrative structure are undermined.
With sweeping impartiality, Paramount Board Chairman Barry Diller says: "I don't like the three-hour version, I don't like the four-and-a-half-hour version and I don't like the five-hour version. Paramount will never distribute this film." Grimaldi, who stands to split any eventual profits with Bertolucci, insists that the picture will somehow reach U.S. screens within a year. If so, Bertolucci is trying through the courts to ensure that it will not be the shortened version.