Overwiew :Tracing 45 years in the lives of two men born just after the turn of the century, Bertolucci's four-hour-plus epic dramatizes the class politics that tore Italy apart. Alfredo (Robert De Niro) is a wealthy padrone who finds himself aligned with the fascists, while his boyhood friend and double, Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), is a peasant-turned-socialist agitator. Their friendship, lives, and loves are strained past all limits by the brutality, prejudice, and warfare that erupt all around them.