starring
Jean-Louis Trintlgnant Stefania Sandrelli
One of the best foreign films shown on BBC2 in the last three years.
Bertolucci's film, set in Fascist Italy before the war, is a graphic picture of a man tortured by sexual and political pressure.
Marcello's life is spent trying to sublimate a childhood crime by behaving as conventionally as possible. A civil servant, engaged to a middle-class girl of limited intelligence, he even volunteers as a Fascist spy in his effort to conform. But this attempt to identify with the ruling class casts Marcello even farther from the society he seeks to support.
Based on the novel by ALBERTO MORAVIA Written and directed by BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI
(An Italian film with English sub-titles)