Production notes

The Conformist was filmed in locations throughout Rome and Paris. Roman locations included the Palazzo dei Congressi, the Museum of the Ara Pacis, Sant' Angelo Bridge, Santa Marinella, the Theatre of Marcellus and the Colosseum. Parisian locales included Gare d'Orsay, Palais de Chaillot, and Joinville-le-Pont. The studio scenes were filmed at Cinecittà. The film cost only seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars to produce. Bertolucci, production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro made heavy use of the 1930s art and décor associated with the Fascist era: the middle-class drawing rooms and the huge halls of the ruling elite. The EUR district of Rome, which was commissioned by Benito Mussolini as a model city, and its rationalist architecture serves as one of the film's key locations. Lead actor Trintignant learned his Italian-language lines phonetically, and per common practice in the Italian film industry at the time, was later dubbed over by another actor, Sergio Graziani. Other actors in the dub cast included Arturo Dominici, Rita Savagnone, Giuseppe Rinaldi and Lydia Simoneschi. Bertolucci's first choices to play Giulia and Anna were Florinda Bolkan and Brigitte Bardot, but the former was busy shooting The Last Valley, and the latter disliked the script. Anouk Aimée was offered a role. The use of in media res and non-chronological storytelling was not in the original script, but determined by Bertolucci and his editor Franco Arcalli during post-production.

The soundtrack composed by Georges Delerue was originally released on LP in Italy in February 1971 by Cinevox. On 5 February 2013, Music Box Records released a limited edition of the soundtrack on CD, containing 15 previously unreleased songs.

Vincent Canby, film critic for The New York Times, praised Bertolucci's screenplay and his directorial effort, and wrote, "Bernardo Bertolucci ... has at last made a very middle-class, almost conventional movie that turns out to be one of the elegant surprises of the current New York Film Festival ... It is also apparent in Bertolucci's cinematic style, which is so rich, poetic, and baroque that it is simply incapable of meaning only what it says ... The movie is perfectly cast, from Trintignant and on down, including Pierre Clementi, who appears briefly as the wicked young man who makes a play for the young Marcello. The Conformist is flawed, perhaps, but those very flaws may make it Bertolucci's first commercially popular film, at least in Europe where there always seems to be a market for intelligent, upper middle-class decadence." Pauline Kael, film critic for The New Yorker, called the film a "sumptuous and emotionally charged experience." A review in Variety stated, "For those who appreciate its subtleties, but also its subsurface power and great evocative qualities, it's a gem." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "much more of a show than a story," with its narrative themes "all but lost amid Bertolucci's splendid recreation of the era. In other words, if you are looking for fashion and furnishing hints, this is the place." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film "places young Bernardo Bertolucci in the front ranks of Italian directors and among the finest film-makers working anywhere. In this dazzling film, Bertolucci, 30, manages to combine the bravura style of a Fellini, the acute sense of period of a Visconti and the fervent political commitment of an Elio Petri (Investigation of a Private Citizen) with complete individuality and, better still, a total lack of self-indulgence." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that the film was "an extraordinarily beautiful and spellbinding picture," but "what's below the surface doesn't stand up to much analysis. I think this is true and that it amounts to a terrible flaw. The dramatic material, while intriguing, isn't adequately developed: many connecting or explanatory scenes appear to be missing (reading the original novel by Alberto Moravia restores some of these), the psychology of the most complex characters is murky, and the climactic and concluding scenes are positively trite." Jan Dawson of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote, "In his screen adaptation of Moravia's novel, Bertolucci has eliminated all explanations or analysed motivations, as well as any allusions to Marcello's life before the moment he first sees Lino ... The effort of these changes, in purely psychological terms, is to reduce Marcello's story to a model Freudian case history." In 1994, critic James Berardinelli wrote a review and heralded the film's look: "Storaro and Bertolucci have fashioned a visual masterpiece in The Conformist, with some of the best use of light and shadow ever in a motion picture. This isn't just photography, it's art – powerful, beautiful, and effective. There's a scene in the woods, with sunlight streaming between trees, that's breathtaking to behold – and all the more stunning because of the brutal events that take place before this background." In a 2012 article in The Guardian, John Patterson defined the film as an "expressionist masterpiece", which "offered a blueprint for a new kind of Hollywood film", inspiring New Hollywood filmmakers. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 98% of 60 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.9/10. The website's consensus reads: "A commentary on fascism and beauty alike, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is acclaimed for its sumptuous visuals and extravagant, artful cinematography." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 100 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Trintignant considered The Conformist one of the best films he acted in.

Wins

Berlin Film Festival: Interfilm Award - Recommendation and Journalists' Special Award, Bernardo Bertolucci; 1970. David di Donatello Awards: David; Best Film, Maurizio Lodi-Fe; 1971. Belgian Film Critics Association: Grand Prix; 1972. National Society of Film Critics Awards: NSFC Award; Best Cinematography, Vittorio Storaro; Best Director, Bernardo Bertolucci; 1972. Satellite Awards: Satellite Award: Best Classic DVD; 2006. Nominations

Berlin Film Festival: Golden Berlin Bear, Bernardo Bertolucci; 1970. Academy Awards: Oscar; Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, Bernardo Bertolucci; 1972. Golden Globes: Golden Globe; Best Foreign-Language Foreign Film Italy; 1972.

The film was influential on other filmmakers; the image of blowing leaves in The Conformist, for example, influenced a very similar scene in The Godfather Part II (1974) by Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola also cast actor Gastone Moschin in the same film, based on his role in The Conformist. Additionally, the scene in which Dominique Sanda's character is chased through the snowy woods after her husband has been murdered, is echoed with mood, lighting and setting in the third-season episode of The Sopranos, "Pine Barrens" (2001), directed by Steve Buscemi. Canadian artist Alex Colville was influenced by the same scene in The Conformist to paint his 1976 work In the Woods. Colville had both seen the film and read Moravia's 1951 novel. In a 1995 interview, pop star Madonna listed it as one of her three favorite movies.