Novecento (1900). 1976. Italy/West Germany. Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Screenplay by Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bertolucci. With Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini, Maria Monti, Sterling Hayden, Alida Valli, Romolo Valli, Stefania Sandrelli, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster. 4K digital restoration by Cinecittà and Cineteca di Bologna; courtesy Cinecittà. In English. 316 min.
Ennio Morricone composed a fittingly operatic score to this magisterial saga of childhood friends from Bernardo Bertolucci’s hometown region of Emilia, Italy. Both born on the day of Verdi’s death (January 27, 1901), one of them the rebellious scion of a wealthy landowner and the other an illegitimate peasant son on his estate, they find themselves swept up by the epic forces of communism and fascism during the first half of the 20th century. “Novecento is crammed with extraordinary actors. Burt Lancaster’s bourgeois old age, Sterling Hayden’s lower-class one, the sorrowful dignity of Maria Monti, Gérard Depardieu’s congenial naturalness, the intellectual doubts of Robert De Niro, Stefania Sandrelli’s intrepid volunteering, the breathless philistinism of Romolo Valli, Laura Betti’s provincial depravity, Dominique Sanda’s overplayed eroticism and the subordinate sadism of Donald Sutherland make up, against a communal backdrop, a mosaic of individual situations and stories” (Alberto Moravia).