The film 1900 (1976), by Bernardo Bertolucci, is a long and high-budget Italian period piece. Its cynical vulgarity and ugly inanity drove me to stop watching it after two hours and nine minutes.

It’s the kind of film a sexual liberal of the Seventies would put out. Two boys talk about their exposed penises. As men they are in bed together with one (prostituting) woman. An aging landowner instructively exhibits to a girl of about fourteen a member that will ever be non-erect. Had enough sex stuff yet? In themselves only one of these scenes is artistically bad (the two boys), but all are part of an offputting two-hour whole. The nine minutes beyond the two hours I saw were stupid (why is Robert De Niro so passive before Dominique Sanda?) I don’t regret not finishing 1900.