General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Conformist (1970 film)

The Conformist (Italian: Il conformista) is a 1970 political drama directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, adapted from Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel of the same name. It follows Marcello Clerici, a repressed bureaucrat in Mussolini's Italy who joins the fascist secret police out of a desperate need to belong, and is assigned to assassinate his former philosophy professor, now an anti-Fascist exile in Paris. The film is widely regarded as a landmark of cinematography for Vittorio Storaro's lighting and composition, and it marked Bertolucci's first genuine international success.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and source	Bernardo Bertolucci; screenplay adapted from Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel Il conformista¹
Principal cast	Jean-Louis Trintignant (Marcello Clerici), Stefania Sandrelli (Giulia), Dominique Sanda (Anna Quadri), Enzo Tarascio (Professor Quadri), Gastone Moschin (Manganiello), Pierre Clémenti (Lino)³
Key crew	Cinematography Vittorio Storaro; production design Ferdinando Scarfiotti; music Georges Delerue; editing Franco Arcalli; costumes Gitt Magrini⁴
Production	Italo-French-German co-production: Mars Film (Rome), Marianne Productions (Paris), Maran Film (Munich); financed by Paramount through CIC at just under $1 million⁵
Awards	Interfilm Prize and Special Journalists' Prize, Berlin 1970; David di Donatello 1971 Best Film; Academy Award nomination 1972, Best Adapted Screenplay; Golden Globe nomination, Best Foreign Language Film⁶
Critical standing	Ranked =118 in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll and =93 in the directors' poll of greatest films⁷
Restoration	New 4K restoration from the original camera negative by Cineteca di Bologna with Minerva Pictures, premiered in 2023⁸

Spoilers

Story

The story opens in 1938 in Rome, where Marcello Clerici has taken a job working for Mussolini's regime and is courting Giulia, a conventional young woman whose marriage will make him, in the film's terms, even more of a conformist.⁹ Clerici is a spy for the fascist political police (the OVRA, the regime's anti-Fascist repression service), and his driving motive is the wish to feel equal to other people after a childhood marked by unstable parents and a traumatic encounter with the family chauffeur Lino, whom the boy shot and believed he had killed.¹⁰^•⁴

His first major assignment takes him to Paris under the cover of his honeymoon, unbeknownst to his wife, to arrange the assassination of Professor Luca Quadri, his former thesis supervisor and now a leading anti-Fascist exile.¹¹ During the mission he becomes drawn to Quadri's wife Anna, and his faith in the regime begins to waver.¹¹ Clerici watches the double assassination of the Quadris from a car in a snowbound forest, then returns to ordinary life.⁴

The ending is set on July 25, 1943, the day Mussolini's rule collapsed. As crowds tear down the symbols of fascism, Clerici recognizes Lino, alive, in the street, and collapses psychologically, realizing he has spent his entire life fleeing a guilt with no foundation, over something that never happened, while a stream of people passes singing the songs of the Liberation.⁴

Production

Bertolucci, then 28, heard the story of Moravia's novel recounted in detail by his girlfriend, the designer Maria Paola Maino, while he was finishing The Spider's Stratagem in 1969. He took the proposal to Paramount's Italian affiliate Mars Film before he had read the book; Paramount approved it in September 1969 and financed it at just under $1 million through CIC (Cinema International Corporation), a joint venture with Universal, funneling the money through Italian and French companies to qualify for European national-cinema support.⁵ Bertolucci then shut himself away for a month with a typewriter and the novel and wrote the screenplay; shooting ran through autumn and winter 1969–70, with postproduction completed by June 1970.⁵^•¹² His cousin Giovanni Bertolucci served as executive producer.⁵

Bertolucci later explained the film's structure: he shot it leaving open the possibility of telling the story chronologically, as Moravia does in the novel, but during shooting he became fascinated by using the car journey to Paris as the present-day thread, the container of the story, so that the protagonist also travels through his own memory. The final shape emerged in editing with Franco Arcalli.¹³ One significant addition to Moravia's text is the reference to Plato's cave, the image of prisoners watching shadows on a wall from Book VII of the Republic, which Bertolucci introduced into the film.¹⁴

Visual style

The film is a milestone in the history of motion-picture photography, the result of a collaboration among Bertolucci, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, all then in their twenties.¹⁵ Storaro amplified the story's themes with lighting built on the play of shadows and the juxtaposition of darkness and character; the American Society of Cinematographers selected the film as one of its 100 Milestone Films in Cinematography of the 20th Century.¹⁵ Storaro researched films of the late 1930s and 1940s in Italy to construct a style grounded in the history of the Italian film industry.¹⁶

Design and architecture. Scarfiotti, who had worked as a set designer with Luchino Visconti, designed the film to reflect the fashions and imposing architecture of the Mussolini era, giving it what distributors describe as an authentic Art Deco look.⁷^•⁸^•¹⁷ One frequently cited sequence shows Giulia seducing Clerici as the striated lines of her dress crisscross with shadows from a venetian blind, forming a chiaroscuro web of light and darkness.⁷ Storaro also used color symbolically, working with a blue-violet dusk light for the Paris scenes and surrounding Clerici with orange translucent glass in a sequence inspired by an alabaster-covered church in Ravenna.¹⁵

The film's narrative form is equally stylized: it unfolds through a complex flashback structure, opening in Paris on the morning Quadri is to be killed and moving freely back and forth in time, with editing effects that break linear narration.²^•¹⁸

Release and reception

Il conformista was presented in competition at the 20th Berlin International Film Festival in June 1970, where it won the Interfilm Prize and the Special Award of the Journalists, and then at the New York Film Festival on September 18, 1970, alongside Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem; Bertolucci was the only director represented by two works at that festival.¹⁹^•²⁰ Its Italian premiere followed in Saint-Vincent on December 8, 1970, with general release in Italian theaters in January 1971; it reached the United States in March 1971 as The Conformist.¹⁹

American reception was largely positive. Vincent Canby of The New York Times admired the complexity with which the film approached sex and politics, calling it a decided improvement over Moravia's novel, and Pauline Kael, in The New Yorker, declined to call it a great movie but described it as a sumptuous, emotionally charged experience, praising Trintignant's intuitive understanding of screen presence.² The film won the David di Donatello for Best Film in 1971 and earned Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations in 1972.⁶ A 1994 re-release restored the "Dance of the Blind" sequence, cut from earlier versions.²¹

Legacy

The film's stature has grown over the decades, particularly among cinematographers, who revere it as one of their art form's towering accomplishments.¹⁵ Storaro's gleaming, dynamic cinematography later proved an inspiration to American directors including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and the Bertolucci–Storaro partnership continued through Last Tango in Paris, 1900, and the nine-Oscar The Last Emperor.⁷^•²² In the 2022 Sight and Sound greatest-films poll it placed =118 among critics and =93 among directors.⁷

A new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, made by Cineteca di Bologna in collaboration with Minerva Pictures under the supervision of the Fondazione Bernardo Bertolucci, premiered in 2023 and toured theaters internationally, including a long run at Film Forum in New York.⁸ Reported running times differ across sources and versions, from 111 minutes (Kino Lorber) to 113 (Cineuropa), 116 (Minerva's international catalog), and 118 (Festival de Cannes), reflecting the film's history of re-edited and restored cuts.⁸^•²³^•²⁴^•²⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026