Farsi
I think that this wonderful but muddled film was originally intended to be seen in English for the International market. Why else would you have Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Robert DeNiro and Donald Sutherland in major roles? Also, some of the other players such as Dominique Sanda and, I think, Laura Betti, acted in English.
This film has a rapturousness that should have been experienced by a wider audience that it had.
Surely Italian. It’s all about Italian history and Italian politics, it takes place in rural Italy, what the hell do you expect people to speak?
Because of the number of major English-speaking actors in this film, I think the English-language version works best. It is hard to watch someone dubbing in Italian for a voice as distinctive as Burt Lancaster, for example. This film was done in Italy during a period when major actors from many countries were acting in Italian films, using their own language and speaking their own lines in their native language. The sets and scenes were multi-lingual, with actors speaking Italian, English, and French, for example, in the same scene. This was before subtitles caught on in such a big way, and became preferred to dubbing.
They would dub the films into several different versions, depending on the market where the film was shown. That way, the English actors would be speaking their own lines when the version was shown in English-language countries, with the other actors not speaking English dubbed in. Same for French-language, Italian-language, German-language versions, etc. A creative period in Italian film, as this film demonstrates.
Italiano.
Bertolucci’s fiished cut, as first shown in 1976 was in Italian. The screenplay itself, I believe, was written in Italian.
Charlesdegaulle
There are different options on the DVD