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population by the scene depicting the ball for the blind, where a gigantic flag surrounded by
Fascist symbols dominates from the back wall; the appearance in the narrative of Clerici's
father as a former Fascist officer, a character not mentioned in Moravia's novel; the
replacement of Moravia's Christian ethics with ethics of laicism, typified by the reference to
Plato's discourse on the blindness of cave dwellers; and finally the way in which Clerici is
given dialogue that overtly criticizes Prof. Quadri for abandoning Italy and blames him for
Clerici becoming a Fascist, all open up a range of questions requiring intellectual evaluation.
However, the peculiarity of The Conformist lies in the way that its activation of
associations, based on history, psychology, philosophy, and art, is embedded in a stylish, noir
framework, which gives the film profundity at both intellectual and affective levels. With The
Conformist, Bertolucci explored an artistic direction that could satisfy his auteurist
aspirations while remaining aesthetically and narratively accessible for mainstream film
viewers. A fundamental contribution to this goal was made by Franco Arcalli whom - as the
director recalls - Bertolucci's cousin Giovanni forced the director to accept in the role of film
editor (Ungari, 1982: 72). Bertolucci credits Arcalli with helping him discover that in the
editing phase there is still room for improvisation, and admits that Arcalli helped him to
conceive of editing not as the negation of creativity, but as a moment of enhancement
(Ungari, 1982: 72-73). Intellectually consistent and emotionally intense throughout, The
Conformist constitutes the most successful attempt by Bertolucci to combine a subjective
auteurist perspective with the visual and technological verve of commercial Hollywood
production. However, this theoretical amalgamation, that might be termed "the third way',
would be less effectively achieved in Bertolucci's subsequent works, many of which did not
attain the same equilibrium between intellectual profundity and cinematic spectacle.
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