SOURCE: Wagstaff, Chris. Review of The Conformist, by Bernardo Bertolucci. Sight and Sound 4, no. 4 (April 1994): 53–54.

In the following review, Wagstaff traces how Bertolucci's The Conformist communicates its major theme and how the reinsertion of a deleted scene affects the overall message of the film.

Few people can resist considering Il conformista Bertolucci's masterpiece. He has constructed from Alberto Moravia's novel an Oedipal story of enormous complexity, both thematically and stylistically, reordering a chronological narrative into a dream, in which Marcello's psyche is gradually penetrated as though in a psychotherapy session during the cocooned car journey to Savoy. Marcello is driven by anxiety about his sexuality, by his sense of having been betrayed by his ‘fathers’ and by a fruitless search for a position of ‘normality’ in the social order. Quadri is an idealist living a hedonistic life in Paris while the struggle against fascism in Italy is the...