General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

The Spider's Stratagem

The Spider's Stratagem (Italian: Strategia del ragno) is a 1970 Italian film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, freely adapted from Jorge Luis Borges's short story "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" (1944). Produced for Italian television by RAI, it follows a young man who returns to his father's hometown to investigate the assassination of a revered anti-fascist hero and discovers that the hero staged his own death.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Strategia del ragno; Italy, 1970, in Italian³
Source	Jorge Luis Borges, "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero", from Ficciones (1944)¹
Director and screenwriters	Bernardo Bertolucci, with Eduardo de Gregorio and Marilù Parolini¹
Lead cast	Giulio Brogi as both Athos Magnani father and son; Alida Valli as Draifa¹
Cinematography	Vittorio Storaro and Franco Di Giacomo, Eastmancolor 35mm, 1.37:1¹
First screening and broadcast	31st Venice Film Festival, August 1970; RaiUno, 25 October 1970¹
Filming	Sabbioneta, Pomponesco, and Villa Longari Ponzone (Rivarolo del Re), July–August 1969¹
Restoration	4K restoration by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna, screened at Venice in 2019²

Spoilers

Plot

Athos Magnani, a thirtysomething man, arrives by train alone in Tara, a small town in the Po Valley, at the request of Draifa, his father's former mistress, who asks him to find out the truth about his father's murder in 1936. The father, also named Athos Magnani and played by the same actor, was an anti-fascist hero assassinated while watching an opera, and the town celebrates his legacy: streets, schools, and stores bear his name, and a bust stands in the main square. Athos never knew his father, who died before he was born, but the two share a name and a remarkable resemblance, which confuses the town's inhabitants.¹^•⁴^•⁵

As Athos questions his father's three old companions and Draifa, he meets conflicting testimony, evasions, and occasional threats. He eventually learns that the "fascist bullet" was fiction: the father's fellow conspirators, convinced by the father himself, staged his execution for an alleged betrayal as an act by fascists, so that the whole population's hatred of the fascist regime would be anchored to his martyrdom. In a monologue quoted in the film's press materials, the father explains that a dead traitor is damaging but a murdered hero whom people can love will keep hatred of fascism alive, turning all of Tara into one big theater.¹

Instead of making the truth public, Athos decides to confirm the legend before going home. He too becomes a prisoner of his father's web when he looks at the train tracks and realizes that trains stopped coming to Tara some time ago.¹

Interpretation and legacy

Scholarship has read the film as a reflection on the political myth of the Italian Resistance. Dominic Gavin places it in the 1970s debates over the antifascist paradigm, arguing that its treatment of the antifascist martyr and the monument to the "fallen" heroes anticipates later academic interest in the construction of public memory.⁹ Norma Bouchard reads the film's structures as questioning the alliance with the anti-fascist Resistance cultivated by postwar Italian institutions, against the backdrop of the early years of what would be called the "strategy of tension."¹⁰ Sergio Rigoletto reads the oedipal conflict between father and son as disrupting the coherent national narrative of antifascism inherited from the Resistance.¹¹ The film has also been compared with John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1964), another story of a legend built on a convenient lie, and is echoed in John Sayles's Lone Star (1995).¹

The film circulated slowly after its broadcast, with releases in Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, and Japan years apart, and it was not shown in Brazil until 1980. It returned to the Venice Film Festival in September 2019 in a restored version, shortly after Bertolucci's death.¹² The 2019 restoration was carried out in 4K by Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and Massimo Sordella with Compass Film and RAI Cinema, using the original camera negative, three-strip color separation positives struck in 1995, and the original magnetic sound.²

Origins and production

Bertolucci made the film as a commission for RAI television, his fourth feature, produced by Giovanni Bertolucci for Red Film with RAI. He described it as arising from the need to confront "the ambiguity of history" and the demystification of heroic father figures, and said he shot it "in a trance-like condition like a dream: it is the dream of a film, the true cinema of memory."²^•⁶ The film marked his first experience with psychoanalysis, and critics have read dreams and the Oedipus complex as running through it.¹

Borges's story is set in nineteenth-century Ireland; Bertolucci transposed the action to twentieth-century Italy, to the Po lowlands.⁴ The fictional town of Tara was filmed largely in Sabbioneta, a Renaissance planned town in Lombardy built in the sixteenth century by a Gonzaga of Mantua, whose intact layout of parallel lines and squares gives the film its harmonious, dreamlike geography; the station scenes were shot in nearby Brescello, and the final staged Rigoletto in the Teatro Magnani in Fidenza.⁵^•¹

Style, light, and music

Cinematography. The film was shot by Vittorio Storaro, in what one critic identifies as his first color film, with Franco Di Giacomo.⁷ Bertolucci conveyed the atmosphere he wanted by showing Storaro René Magritte's painting L'Empire des lumières, in which a warm yellow light shines from the center of a blue landscape at dusk. He shot much of the film in the brief interval of light between day and evening, producing a blue that he said all camera operators of the time feared; at least half the film is blue.⁷^•⁶ The tracking shots, Bertolucci said, always ran sideways, parallel to people and walls, like the old local trains of the Po lowlands.²

Music. The soundtrack draws on excerpts from Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto and Attila, Arnold Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38, Giuseppe Blanc's fascist-era anthem Giovinezza, and Mina and Martelli's Come un fior. Verdi's Rigoletto, itself a drama of betrayal and disguise, punctuates the pre-finale and the mystery's solution, echoing the traitor who wears the mask of a hero.¹ The father's assassination takes place at the opera.⁵

Television in black and white. Although the film was conceived, written, and shot in color, RAI in 1970 still broadcast only in black and white, so the film aired in monochrome, partially penalizing Bertolucci's direction and Storaro's cinematography.²

Reception

The film premiered at the 31st Venice Film Festival in August 1970 and was first broadcast on RaiUno on Sunday evening, 25 October 1970, after the main news, with a repeat the following Friday that Wagstaff describes as almost unheard of. The Sunday audience was assessed at 4.5 million, with audience approval at 49 percent, which Wagstaff calls relatively low; the film was not theatrically released in Italy until 1972, by his account. Bertolucci, who had chosen a straightforward mystery narrative hoping to make a transparent parable, re-edited the final sequence after watching the broadcast.⁷

The film won the Luis Buñuel award.¹ Critical responses have varied in emphasis. Rotten Tomatoes records a 100 percent Tomatometer from 13 reviews and a 79 percent audience score, with critics praising Bertolucci's "gift for surrounding a claustrophobic theme with a sense of light and space" (Penelope Houston, Sight & Sound) and Empire's five-star verdict on his "superb dramatic thriller."⁸ Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote that it was The Spider's Stratagem rather than the glossier The Conformist, made just afterward and released the same year, that renewed his faith in Bertolucci's talent, calling it the more ponderous and adventurous work in which the director truly grappled with his material.¹ Others rank it below The Conformist; the Rotten Tomatoes editorial summary notes Bertolucci directed both films the same year.⁸

Notes on conflicting details

Sources disagree on two points. Cineuropa and the 2019 Venice catalog give a running time of 100 minutes, while the Bertolucci estate's film file gives 110 minutes and Rotten Tomatoes lists 1 hour 40 minutes.³^•¹^•⁸ On the father's death, the Bertolucci estate's synopsis and Italy for Movies date the assassination to 1936, while Wheeler Winston Dixon's Senses of Cinema annotation says the father is revered for defying the fascists during World War II.¹^•⁵^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 1970s films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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