The Conformist

People are so quick to describe the 1970s as a great decade for American film, it's often forgotten that the decade saw excellent movies being made elsewhere in the world. In Britain, we had Get Carter, The Wicker Man and A Clockwork Orange. In Germany, Werner Herzog made Aguirre, The Wrath of God. And in Italy, Bernardo Bertolucci wrote and directed The Conformist.

It says a lot about the quality of The Conformist that Bernardo Bertolucci would be considered a great director even if he'd never made another film. That he'd previously shot Before The Revolution and The Spider's Stratagem and went on to film Last Tango In Paris and 1900 among others serves only to endorse his excellence.

A sensual political period drama, The Conformist (aka Il Conformista) stars the ace French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant as Marcelo Clerici, a weak-willed Italian who has embraced Mussolini and his Brown Shirts. Encouraged to embrace conformity by his new bride, Giulia (Sandrelli), Clerici finds that his French honeymoon is to double as an attempt on the life of his former teacher (Tarascio), now a political dissident living in exile. Packed off to Paris with a pistol, it slowly emerges that Marcelo has a twisted personal history in which sex and violence go hand in hand.

The film is a satisfyingly adult blend of sex, politics and period detail, but that isn't really going far enough. Instead, it's perhaps best to see the film as proof of what's possible when everyone working on a film hits their stride. With Bertolucci doing a great job of adapting Alberto Moravia's novel, so composer Georges Delerue and the director's cinematographer of choice, Vittorio Storaro, both chose this occasion to deliver their very best work. And as for Bertolucci the director, he's a filmmaker with such an understanding of the form that he can effortlessly shift between the erotic and the romantic.

Jean-Louis Trintignant is an actor as at home in spaghetti westerns (The Big Silence) as in human dramas (Three Colours: Red). However, he was never more beautiful nor more brilliant than as Clerici, a seemingly despicable man who, in spite of everything, we continue to feel for. Stefania Sandrelli, Dominique Sanda and Enzo Tarascio are also on top form with each bringing fragile emotion to a film that could so easily have been glacial.

The home of one of cinema's greatest sex scenes (the train journey to work will never seem quite the same again), The Conformist is enriched by Bertolucci's mature understanding of relationships. And if the approach to sexual politics is convincing, the film's handling of fascism is far removed from the black-and-white political messages of many films. Indeed, at a time when films tend to treat the audience as children, it's quite something to watch The Conformist, a film that only feels dated because it harks back to a time when intelligence and class were the true hallmarks of great cinema.