Word: niro
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Then you start thinking of comparisons: Robert De Niro blowing the star-spangled mailbox to smithereens in Mean Streets; Al Pacino in uniform at his sister's wedding in The Godfather, telling Diane Keaton how his father enforced a contract, his voice full of casual, measured menace; Dustin Hoffman end-running out of the church in The Graduate. At moments like those, you expect the film to freeze and to see a title appear: "The legend starts here." Travolta's walk said that...
...play. Both Donny and Bobby (jitteringly played by Lloyd Brass) are deferential to Teach, a self-assured, macho punk and Donny's old buddy. Guilfoyle brings an excellent manic intensity to his part. His mannerisms, a shambling set of neverending words and motions, are largely reminiscent of Robert De Niro in Mean Streets. Teach, a grown-up yet immature punk, follows De Niro's Johnny Boy, save that Guilfoyle lacks De Niro's genius, and his Teach is self-consciously smart, whereas Johnny Boy is too dumb to know any better...
Before there was Pacino, or De Niro, or Nicholson-before there were James Dean and Marlon Brando even -there was Montgomery Clift. Bursting onto the screen in Red River and The Search (both 1948), Clift set the standard for a whole generation of actors. He was intense and hypnotically alive. His lines seemed to come not from the script but from the gut, and he seemed dangerously unpredictable, like a high-tension wire torn from its moorings. For the better part of a decade, Clift was the star producers sought first. But then, in the longest suicide in Hollywood history...
This, Bertolucci seems to suggest, is the reason the class struggle remains unresolved: personal ties obscure class warfare, ideology notwithstanding; it is hard to kill people one has always known. As young men, De Niro and Depardieu fought each other to prove their courage; as old men, they will fight, but the struggle has become oddly depersonalized, the inevitable outcome of the existence of a class system...
...message is valid, it does not lend itself easily to a heavyhanded treatment. The main conflict in 1900 is the love these two men bear for each other, across ideological and social grounds; and the main question we are left with is why they bear it. De Niro and Depardieu are both fine actors, and play their roles well, so the fault lies elsewhere--probably with their director. In his effort to give 1900 an epic vastness, it seems, Bertolucci lost sight of the smaller things, the individuals around whom the epic apparently revolves...