The Conformist

Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (Italian: Il conformista) adapts Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel of the same name. It was Bertolucci's fourth feature, made when he was twenty-nine, and it brought him his first Oscar nomination, for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 1972 ceremony, two decades before his sweep with The Last Emperor. Sight & Sound returned it to its Greatest Films of All Time list in the 2022 critics' poll.

Vittorio Storaro, then in his early thirties, shot it, and few single contributions to colour cinematography have had as much influence. His deep blues and ambers, his architectural framing and his choreographed long takes have turned up in dozens of later productions. Francis Ford Coppola has named the film as the central visual influence on The Godfather the following year, and Paul Schrader, Brian De Palma and Wes Anderson have all credited it directly in interviews.

Jean-Louis Trintignant leads, with Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda, Gastone Moschin and Pierre Clémenti in major supporting roles. The score is by Georges Delerue, the prolific French composer who would shortly score Truffaut's Day for Night among many others. It was shot largely in Rome and Paris, and Storaro used the actual EUR district, Mussolini's monumental fascist-modernist quarter, as a continuous architectural backdrop. Of all the fiction films made about Italian fascism, this is the one that matters most.