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een 'to some degree inspired by Bertolucci's Conformist' (Naremore, 1998: 206). By
contrast it does not appear in Mary Wood's survey of Italian film noir, the critic mentioning
instead The Grim Reaper for the final scene set in the dance hall (Wood, 2007: 249). Wood
introduces her analysis by highlighting the difficulty of discussing noir in an Italian context,
given that the term giallo defines an established tradition of crime stories, and has become so
broad that it is often accompanied by an adjective, such as giallo erotica, giallo politico
(Wood, 2007: 236). Wood's view that 'noir conventions are used so widely that they
constitute an intellectual and creative choice, rather than a genre' is also valid (Wood, 2007:
238). I would add that when they are used in different kinds of narratives, such as the cases
where noir touches are blended with a realist style, certain films can fall into the broader
category of 'poliziesco' (the detective genre), with the exception of films by Antonioni,
which remain centred on symbolic representations of existentialist issues. Wood adds that the
films of Damiani, Petri and Rosi are conceived of in Italy as films 'di impegno civile' or
films committed to exploring social issues (Wood 2007: 268).
While my earlier comparison between Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano and The Grim
Reaper indicated some analogies, Elio Petri's Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
(1970) which was made during the same period as Tlie Confonnist signals a self-
awareness of the kind of genre being deployed, by repeated close-ups of gialli novels strewn
around the female protagonist's room, that is more overt and playful than in Bertolucci's
film. Although Petri's film, like The Confonnist, is constructed around flashbacks, they
proceed on the logical and chronological lines of a telic narration, with the protagonist always
in control of the situation. Instead, in The Conformist, the protagonist is far from in control,
and the flashbacks follow an associational pattern which reflects the film's paratelic
narration. The eroticism of the female protagonist in Petri's film was a provocative ingredient
to startle the hypocritical moral attitude of contemporary Italian society, and does not
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