Bernardo Bertolucci's vast historical melodrama used the massive popular, critical, and financial success of its predecessor, the scandalous LAST TANGO IN PARIS, to mount a production of epic scale. Cut down to four hours for its American release, the film utilizes an all-star Hollywood cast to tell its heavily Marxist tale of Italian peasants during the twentieth century. Two boys born on the same day are destined for divergent paths; Olmo (played by Gerard Depardeiu as an adult) is born to peasant parents and will become a passionate socialist, while Alfredo's (Robert De Niro as an adult) bourgeois, landowning origins will lead him to ultimately embrace fascism.

Driven by a sincere hope for and belief in political change, Bertolucci's film is nonetheless made up of very humane individual stories; it concentrates on highly personal experiences of a politically-charged time, which color the little dramas of love, sex, family, and community. It is at once an epic poem and a political manifesto, and it is the product of a director who was unabashedly communist in his youth, contrasting markedly with later works like 2003's THE DREAMERS. The fact that 1900 managed to get released by a major American studio during the height of the Cold War is remarkable in itself, and this fact possibly accounts for the film's lack of popular success when first encountered by audiences. The final sequence, which portrays the Italian peasants overthrowing their fascist masters and dancing beneath the red flag of Communism, sparked controversy on all sides, with the left criticizing it for historical inaccuracy, and the right obviously inflamed by the glorification of Communism. Bertolucci himself called it a dream sequence, an anticipation of the revolution yet to come, and indeed the entire movie is something of a celebration of the human spirit and the will to overcome.