The Conformist

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

The cinematography is by Vittorio Storaro, then in his early thirties, and is regularly cited as one of the most influential single contributions to colour photography in the history of cinema. Storaro's deep-blue and amber palettes, his use of architectural framing and his choreographed long takes have been catalogued in dozens of subsequent 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.

The cast is led by Jean-Louis Trintignant, 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 and many others. The production was shot largely in Rome and Paris, with Storaro using the actual EUR district — Mussolini's monumental fascist-modernist quarter — as a continuous architectural backdrop. The film is widely treated as the most important single fictional engagement with Italian fascism in the cinema.