A Messy Fight for the Final Cut

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 succes 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.

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.

Bertolucci's best hope seems to be his unfinished four-hour, 25-minute compromise cut--if it exists. Grimaldi contends that the only usable negative of it has been destroyed; Bertolucci disagrees. A small U.S. distributor with friendly ties to Bertolucci, Caribou Films, is now pressing Grimaldi to bring forth the compromise cut so it can negotiate for the rights. If that does not work, says Bertolucci, "I may have to break into the studio where Grimaldi has locked it up, steal it and circulate it underground."

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