SOURCE: Wagstaff, Chris. “Theatre of Memory.” Sight and Sound 1, no. 5 (September 1991): 14–17.

In the following review, Wagstaff examines the middle period of Bertolucci's career, focusing on The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist.

In the reign of Augustus, Horace admonished poets to seek a judicious balance between edifying and pleasing their readers. In 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci (born into a family of poets) came to the end of a painful search for that balance, and shot two films in the same year, La strategia del ragno (The Spider's Stratagem) and Il conformista (The Conformist). Both films tell of the assassination of a prominent anti-fascist in the 30s; in both films the surface level of that story covers a ‘latent’ Oedipal rivalry, in which a son figure comes to doubt the political integrity of the anti-fascist father figure; in both films the relationship of the son figure and the wife/mistress of the...