Reeling backward: "1900" (1976)

"1900" is a movie that is at once very large and very small.

It was Bernardo Bertolucci's self-conscious attempt to create an epic film about Italy's struggle between fascism and socialism. He framed his tale around two characters, the son of a rich landowner or padrone and the son of a peasant, who were born on the same day and raised together. We watch them from boyhood to middle age to dotage, striving against each other, eternal friends and combatants.

The title is somewhat confusing. In Italian it was known as "Twentieth Century" to indicate the scope and sweep of the story, but perhaps they thought American audiences would confuse it with the studio. So they came up with "1900," which itself is something of a misnomer, since the movie explicitly begins on the day Giuseppe Verdi died, in 1901, when both boys are born.

Released nearly 40 years ago, "1900" is known today for three things.

There is the sexual content, which at one point earned an NC-17 rating during a 1991 re-release. It includes a scene where fully nude stars Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu are masturbated by a women simultaneously -- one (obstinately flaccid) cock in each hand.

There are the various edits of the film, all of them long. Bertolucci fought with his financial backers, at one point being literally locked out of the editing room, and different iterations of "1900" have been shown at different times and venues. Traditionally the movie has been exhibited in two parts, though the run time has varied quite a bit. I saw the full director's cut, a hair over 5¼ hours, which places it among the longest narrative films ever released.

(There is no official intermission, and my viewing took place over several days, by necessity.)

Lastly, there is the pretty uniform perception that the film is a dog, a disaster even. Right after "Last Tango in Paris," Bertolucci was being hailed as the new European master. Many people were expecting the Italian equivalent of "The Godfather" parts 1 & 2, and were left sorely disappointed by the shambling narrative.

Roger Ebert put it succinctly in his review: "Bertolucci had his pick of actors, a free run with his budget, the freedom to make a personal film. And he blew it."

I think it's still a worthy cinematic experience, and certainly it is a very beautiful film to gaze upon. Ennio Morricone, one of my favorite film composers, came up with a lush score to back up the visuals of cinematographer Vittorio Storaro. The rustic, slightly dreamy look of it reminded me very much of Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven."

The main problem with the film is that it wants to use the two main characters, Alfredo Berlinghieri and Olmo Dalcò (De Niro and Depardieu, respectively), as representatives of the competing aims of fascism and socialism, and neither one is a particularly good fit.

Olmo is a born troublemaker who instinctively identifies with the collectivist agrarian ideas of his large clan, who have worked the Berlinghieri lands for generations, essentially as indentured servants. He has a tendency to provoke conflict but then shy away from the consequences, so he doesn't make for a very heroic leader of the proletariat. When he finally stands up enough to make the fascists respond, he runs away, so their punishment is visited upon his family instead.

Alfredo is even thornier. As played by De Niro, he's a pampered rich boy who takes his wealth and status for granted, but is more sympathetic to the socialist sentiments of his workforce than are his fellow landowners. When we first meet him in young manhood, Alfredo is extremely cocky and hedonistic, preferring parties, booze and cocaine over the dull homestead. Later, after taking his place as padrone, he becomes defined by his indecision. A main character who won't make a choice is rarely a compelling one.

He won't stand up to the local leader of the fascist blackshirts, Attila, even though he is Alfredo's employee. Donald Sutherland plays Attila, a snarling, depraved man who sees the fascist movement as the proper vehicle in which to express his masochism and lust for power. We see him use his forehead to smash the life out of a helpless cat, and later he sodomizes and then kills a young boy in a similar fashion.

Sutherland is arresting in the role, by far the most vivid character in "1900." But narratively he's problematic.

It's much the same issue I had with the Michael Fassbender character in "12 Years a Slave." By making a single person the representation of all evil in a movement that entailed millions of people, you end up making that character a cartoon. And you let the multitudes who embraced fascism/slavery/the Holocaust, etc. -- or were complacent in its atrocities -- off the hook.

So why exactly won't Alfredo simply fire Attila and banish him from his lands, given that the essentially existed in a feudal system with himself as lord? It's never really answered, or even explored.

The best part of the film is the first 90 minutes or so when Olmo and Alfredo are rambunctious boys. Roberto Maccanti and Paolo Pavesi play them as youths of about 12, and are both terrific. (They have their own controversial nude scene in which they compare their foreskins.)

They have all sorts of spats and adventures, such as Olmo lying underneath a passing locomotive. (Alfredo takes up the dare but then balks.) In one of the film's most visually memorable moments, Olmo catches live frogs from the farm's irrigation canals and ties them, alive and wriggling, to his hat.

Two figures who lord over this section with magisterial sweep are the boys' grandfathers. Leo Dalcò is played by the great Sterling Hayden, while Burt Lancaster is Alfredo Berlinghieri the elder. Each man has an intuitive grasp of his place in the world, and their relationship to each other. In some ways it mirrors that of their grandchildren, a strange brew of respect, affection and antagonism.

Leo is initially hostile to the socialist movement, teaching Olmo that he will always be a peasant and to accept his fate. Still, his heart is with the land and the people, so it doesn't take much to convince him to join a strike. Leo is a servant of capitalist tradition, but socialist ideals aren't much of a stretch for him: "If it's yours," he tells young Olmo, "then it belongs to all of us."

The older Berlinghieri has traits of both nobility and venality about him. He sees his workers as chattel, much like the stock in his milking pen, but he's also the sort of man who believes in treating his animals well. His own son, young Alfredo's father, inherits all of the man's pride and entitlement but none of his wisdom. In another seminal moment from the film, when the new padrone tells the workers he's cutting their wages in half, one of the men slices off his own ear and offers it to the master as a symbol of his lost dignity.

"1900" loses focus and momentum in the second half. Much of it is taken up with Alfredo's relationship and marriage with a half-mad Parisian woman, Ada, played by Dominique Sanda. Her face and low, dusky voice reminded me very much of Lauren Bacall. She's one of those women who insists on being the center of attention in any room she occupies, even if she has to act completely batty to force the limelight. Predictably, she becomes resentful of life in the country and turns to drink.

Olmo's own wife, Anita (Stefania Sandrelli), checks out of the movie midway, dying in childbirth. She is actually Olmo's instructor in the ways of socialism, but their relationship doesn't have much spark outside of that.

The other significant character is Regina, Alfredo's cousin and childhood playmate. She clearly expected to become his wife one day, and when he chooses a wan foreigner over her, it drives Regina into the arms of Attila. She becomes his hate-whisperer, urging him on to ever more destructive acts as a way to spite Alfredo.

Regina is played by Laura Betti. About 20 years older than De Niro and Depardieu, with a matronly build and stout face, Betti's presence is an incongruous one, seeming more like the witchy aunt than the third leg of a supposed love triangle.

It's interesting to note that Bertolucci filmed "1900" with actors from America, France, Italy and other nations, and instructed them all to speak in their native language. This was a not uncommon practice with international productions of the 1960s and '70s -- Sergio Leone did so with his spaghetti Westerns. So watching the film on video poses a dilemma.

In general I prefer to view non-English films in their own language with subtitles. But doing so meant watching De Niro, Lancaster and Hayden with obviously dubbed voices -- and not very good ones, either. Meanwhile, Depardieu speaks in French, the Italians in Italian, and so forth.

So I opted to watch mostly in English, but would switch to French for Depardieu's long dialogue scenes and occasionally to Italian. (This revealed that Sanda, with her distinctive low moan, apparently did her English and French lines herself.)

It was somewhat distracting, but not much. I can only imagine how it complicated the give-and-take between actors on a set.

"1900" is a flawed film, but it's certainly a noble failure. Seeing it is obviously not a thing to be undertaken lightly, given the sheer investment in time alone. But I am glad I did so.

Reeling Backward: "Five Steps to Danger" (1957)

In the grand tradition of mis-named movies comes "Five Steps to Danger." Though it's not quite as egregious as "Across the Pacific," a Humphrey Bogart war espionage drama in which the Pacific Ocean is never even seen, most of the action in the 1957 thriller takes place on the highway from Arizona to Santa Fe.

It's a road picture, and not a very good one, and when and where these five misplaced steps take place is never made clear. The book writer/director Henry S. Kesler adapted it from is called "The Steel Mirror," so gosh knows where the concept of this ill-fated walk came from.

Sterling Hayden, who was more or less the antithesis of a movie star, plays John Emmett. He's such a nondescript Everyman that we never even learn where he's from or what he does for a living. If not for Hayden's inimitable, ornery charisma the character would have slid off the screen like a melted Popsicle.

It's a dippy, third-rate spy flick with a gooey love story tacked on top like a sheepskin spread across the hood of Emmett's ragtop convertible. His car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, so he sells it to the mechanic for $400, intending to continue his trip by bus. Emmett's got a month's vacation lined up and a cozy spot for fishing and hunting picked out.

Until, that is, he runs into Ann Nicholson (Ruth Roman), a woman on the run -- in her own convertible, of course. She's driving from Los Angeles to Santa Fe for mysterious reasons, and recruits Emmett to be her wheel man. Soon they start running into trouble involving German spies, Soviet spies, intercontinental ballistic missiles, the FBI and the CIA.

Talk about a dame who's all trouble.

Roman's role is to basically just look confused and vulnerable all the time, and hoping a dashing hero comes to her rescue. At first she claims to be married, but then we're told she's a widow, and rich to boot.

Even at 80 minutes, the movie is a slog of dull dialogue scenes interspersed with a car chase or two, and some improbable canoodling between Ann and Emmett. If I've got my math right, they end up getting married two days after first meeting. Officially that's to keep Ann's psychiatrist, Dr. Simmons (Werner Klemperer), from having her committed to a mental institution against her will. But also because -- don't ya know -- he's fallen in love.

I love the hamminess of the scene where Emmett tells her he loves her. As hard-boiled a performer as there was, Hayden summons up all the emotional feeling as if he were ordering a pork chop dinner.

"Five Steps to Danger" is a prime example of mid-century B-movie filmmaking. It's plodding, unbelievable and dull all at once. Kesler was a TV guy -- this was the only narrative feature film he ever directed. I'm can't say I'm surprised.

Reeling Backward: "Flat Top" (1952)

Back when I was young and foolish and hadn't yet been turned on to classic movies, "Flat Top" is exactly the sort of film I had in mind when I disdainfully sniffed about stiff, dull storytelling of yesteryear. Having come a long way and watched thousands of old flicks since my teenage days, I can safely say that this is a truly terrible movie, no matter what the vintage.

Sterling Hayden could be a dynamic, mesmerizing film presence when cast in the right role. The actor was rather contemptuous of his own career, dismissing movie stars as overpaid wastes. Clearly he was not challenged by his part in the 1952 action/drama set aboard a World War II aircraft carrier. Hayden delivers his lines in flat, stentorian cadences that seem to suggest he doesn't give a damn what you think.

The tale is a familiar one. A cagey war veteran is put in charge of training and leading a bunch of green neck pilots into battle against the Japanese. The group of newcomers, another bunch of the "swell guys" of disparate backgrounds so common to war pictures, are initially put off by their by-the-book commander. The #2 guy, who believes in treating the underlings like friends, continually pushes back against the iron fist of the big kahuna.

Ultimately, though, the rank-and-file learn that the head man's disposition was the right one all along, and they are turned into a solid fighting unit where everyone works as part of a team. The film ends with the #2, now a devotee of his skipper's harsh methods, being promoted to the top spot. We even are gifted with a bit where the resident hot dog of the group, who found himself grounded on his first day aboard ship for waiving off his signalman, replicates the exact same scenario with a new recruit.

I guess what I find most objectionable about this type of moviemaking is that it's so utterly predictable. Five minutes in, you know exactly how the rest of the story will go. You can almost even pick which of the swell guys will be the ones to buy it in the skies -- the budding poet, the guy with the guitar, the nice one everyone likes, etc.

Richard Carlson plays the #2 guy, and other notable cast members include William Schallert, Keith Larsen, William Phipps and John Bromfield.

The other big failing of "Flat Top" is the action scenes, which play out like a litany of grainy stock footage intermixed (badly) with studio shots of the actors in cockpits. Back in the day it was probably deemed exciting to include actual footage from aerial dogfights and naval strafing runs. But it's clear that the action was edited around the available shots -- some of which are repeated twice or more -- rather than trying to create a seamless, plot-driven sequence

Believe it or not, this film was actually nominated for an Academy Award for Best Editing. Times change, as do standards, I hope.

Most laughable is whenever a plane begins a deep descent or ascent -- director Lesley Selander simply rotates the camera clockwise or counterclockwise to match the corresponding action. And when a pilot dies, it always transpires in the exact same way: a bloom of bullet holes appear in the glass of his canopy, the actor closes his eyes and tilts his head backward, before slumping over, and the camera rotating us into a supposed dive of death.

Watching "Flat Top," I know how they felt.

1 star out of four

Video review: "The Killing: The Criterion Collection"

Not much in the way of new films coming out on video this week, so let's journey to the past for 1956's "The Killing," the third feature by director Stanley Kubrick and his first studio film. It's a hard-boiled film noir starring the great Sterling Hayden as the head of a gang looking to knock over a horse track for a cool $2 million.

"The Killing" is being released this week by The Criterion Collection. If you're not familiar with the Criterion outfit, they're the gold standard for the serious video collector. They only release films of significant artistic achievement -- though there's been some quibbling about that definition as of late -- and pull out all the stops in terms of the quality of the transfer and sumptuous extra features.

In most cases, a Criterion Collection release includes a restoration or remastering of the film itself, and "The Killing" is no exception. Kubrick's use of shadows is veritably oppressive, and the black-and-white cinematography (by Lucien Ballard) looks exquisite.

Kubrick, who also wrote the screenplay based on a novel by Lionel White, splits his effort between the taut logistics of the heist itself and the various personality defects of the people caught up in it.

Elisha Cook Jr. has a memorable turn as a nebbishy inside man, and Marie Windsor is positively slithery as his greedy, back-stabbing wife whose scheming brings the whole enterprise to disaster.

Interesting note: The title has several meanings, from a colloquialism for a major robbery, to the fact that the gang shoots one of the horses to cause a distraction, and that most of the cast winds up dead.

It's a worthy wind-up by perhaps the greatest filmmaker of the last half-century.

Video goodies are quite good: An interview with producer James B. Harris, archive interviews of Sterling Hayden, a feature about author White, and a booklet with an essay. It even comes with a copy of Kubrick's second film, "Killer's Kiss."

Now that's a steal.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "The Asphalt Jungle"

Was there ever a film noir as dour and cynical as "The Asphalt Jungle"? Was there ever an anti-hero as hard-boiled as Sterling Hayden's Dix Handley?

I think the answer to both questions is a resounding "no."

Director John Huston's 1950 masterpiece is a vision of grime and human depravity. The main character is a hooligan who kills quickly and without remorse, and seems indifferent to the girl who is clearly in love with him. And yet, he's the closest thing to a redeemable character in the picture.

What's most striking about the film is how criminals are portrayed as professionals with a job to do, not necessarily evil people who enjoy inflicting hurt. Made during a time when the Production Code decreed that criminals always had to be shown getting their comeuppance, Huston's depiction of cops and crooks caught in the same shadowy underworld ot temptation was practically an open rebellion.

No one in "Jungle" is shown as being purely evil. Sure, Dix is a Kentucky farmboy-turned street muscle, but his dream is to buy back the family horse farm they had to give up in the Depression. "Doc" Erwin Riedenschneider (Same Jaffe, in an Oscar-nominated performance) is the criminal mastermind who goes about his work with utter professionalism and respect for his peers. Doc is a jewel thief with the demeanor of a lab scientist.

His scheme for a big jewel heist is funded by a respectable lawyer, Lon Emmerich (Louis Calhern). Except for one problem -- Emmerich is broke himself, the price of leading a double life with a high-cost girlfriend who must be kept in gin and furs. She's played by Marilyn Monroe in one of her first substantial screen roles, already displaying the legendary sex appeal that would propel her to fame, and limit her career.

Marc Lawrence has an effective turn as Cobby, the small-time bookie who'd like to break into the big time, and acts as go-between for Emmerich. The attorney's plan is to use Cobby's dough to finance the heist, then make off with the goods himself, with the help of a lowlife private investigator played by Brad Dexter.

Rounding out the cast are James Whitmore as Gus, Dix's hunchback friend and an occasional wheel man, when he's not running the local greasy spoon diner. And Jean Hagen plays the dame, whose name is literally Doll. (At first, I thought that was just what Dix was calling her, but no, that's her actual name.) Doll's had some hard luck herself, and is crashing at Dix's place when he gets the call to join Doc's crew.

As Dix, Hayden is a pastiche of icy glares and jawboned dialogue that tumbles out of his mouth like he has contempt for every word. Hayden was an interesting Hollywood iconoclast: He began his life as a sailor, and fell into acting because he thought it was easy, and paid well. He made little attempt to conceal his contempt for the acting craft, which cost him jobs later on in his career. I read somewhere that Hayden was supposed to play the role of Captain Quint in "Jaws," but Robert Shaw took over because of Hayden's tax trouble.

The robbery goes well at first, but an increasing number of complications keep cropping up. After Emmerich's double-cross fails, Doc and Dix are on the run with a bag full of jewels and no fence to pay them.

Doc's capture by the police is one of the all-time great scenes in crime movies. Doc has a weakness for girls, and had planned to use the money to retire to Mexico in luxury. He makes it out of the city -- the film is set in an unnamed Midwest metropolis, possibly Cincinnati, where it was partially shot -- and seems to have gotten away. While resting in a roadside diner, he spies a teen girl who's upset that the two boys she's with have run out of nickels for the jukebox. He offers her a couple dollars worth so he can sit awhile and watch her provocative dancing. Meanwhile, some cops spy him through the window and arrest him when he comes out.

Doc's questioning of one of the police men about how long they had been waiting for him is poignant, since it's clear that if he hadn't delayed to satisfy his lust, he could have gotten away.

Every man has a weakness, the message of the film seems to be, and the jungle of the modern city acts as a pressure cooker to bring out their worst instincts. Dix says he can't wait to get back to Kentucky so he can wash the dirt of the city off of him.

Huston wrote the script with Ben Maddow, based on the book by W.R. Burnett. There's a great line of dialogue where Emmerich is talking about how people treat criminals as a lower form of humanity than "respectable" people like himself. "They're not so different. After all, crime is merely a left-handed form of human endeavor."

The irony that the lowly professional criminals hold up their end of the bargain, and the eminent lawyer is the one who louses things up with his dirty scheming, is tasty indeed.

4 stars