Film buffs, I apologize in advance. I’m about to denigrate one of your demigods.

But the truth is, although I enjoy a fairly wide range of movies, Bernardo Bertolucci  has never done anything to grab my attention.

Except one: an excruciatingly brief, failed three-way between a young Robert De Niro, an equally young Gerard Depardieu, and Ellen Schweirs as a possibly epileptic prostitute (I was never sure) in the five-hour-long slog known as 1900.

I didn’t know about that scene when I sat down to watch the film in the late-mid-90s. I only knew that I’d recently seen Johnny Guitar, and I was on a Sterling Hayden kick.

Around about the time that I popped in the second of three bootleg VHS tapes, I thought to myself, “Would it have killed Bernie to put in a splashy musical number?” Sadly, the thing remained as flat as a Roman pizza.

The saving grace was this short scene, which is sort of climactic and anticlimactic all at once. Climactic because De Niro fiddles with Depardieu’s junk (which struck me as weird), but anticlimactic because, well, because of obvious reasons:

http://flashservice.xvideos.com/embedframe/372253

FYI, I don’t recommend clicking on that video (or this link, if the embed is wonky) unless you’re alone or working someplace fairly permissive. This is the sort of clip you don’t find on YouTube.