Word: conformists
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...years, is a sort of symbolic biography of the French swindler (nicely played by Jean-Paul Belmondo) whose exposure almost brought down the Third Republic in 1934. Resnais has had the movie photographed like a posh '30s illustration, a style made fashionable by films as varied as The Conformist and Chinatown. But Resnais undercuts all his images of antique chic (among which may be counted Anny Duperey as Stavisky's wife) with symbols of death: orchids, cemeteries, the funeral pyramid in the Pare Monceau. Resnais and his screenwriter, Jorge Semprun (Z), present their Stavisky as a doom-haunted...
Amarcord also has a strong political subcurrent, and like some other recent movies from Italy (Visconti's The Damned, Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist), it considers the source and meaning of European fascism. But Amarcord never becomes preoccupied with the phenomenon. Fellini works the politics evenly and gracefully into the fabric of the whole movie and portrays fascism as a crackbrained aberration that allowed for some moments of ritual absurdity even as it brought forth a kind of cagey, half-comic defiance. One of Amarcord's most memorable episodes concerns the playing...
...when the Welles shows a good movie from the '30s that's set in an earlier era, it helps us appreciate more honest modern period films that aren't covert about their modern sensibilities, such as Thieves Like Us or The Conformist. People can read old books without having to feel nostalgic; showing old movies helps people understand them without recourse to nonsensical critical praise about being "nostalgic" or "camp...
...Stratagem (1969) lengthened a tightly constructed story by Borges to the breaking point. These films, in varying degree, destroyed what was good in their sources without adding anything else. Partner, in particular, which obliterates its source with such effectiveness--and to such little artistic effect--contrasts strongly with The Conformist, for which Bertolucci reordered Alberto Moravia's novel in order to rebuild it on the strongest of visual terms. In The Conformist, Bertolucci presents the same anti-bourgeois, anti-fascist feelings that make up the moral tone of Moravia's novel; in Partner, there is no moral stance aside from...
...Heavily involved in the Theater of Cruelty, one of the Jacobs says, "People believe themselves immortal. We must give them a sense of death." Bertolucci's own beliefs may be showing through in lines like these, as they never do when he echoes Moravia's political sentiments in The Conformist. Last Tango in Paris is pure Bertolucci, written without a source, and it too gives us a sense of death. But in that film there was a fervent impression of life set apart from a dying culture outside. Partner gives no importance to life at all. Stefania Sandrelli and Tina...