STRATEGIA DEL RAGNO / THE SPIDER'S STRATAGEM (1970)

Or: THE MAN WHO SHOT ATHOS MAGNANI. For Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970 was the year of THE CONFORMIST, now looking more & more like his masterpiece.* Yet he also found time to squeeze in this beauty, a Jorge Luis Borges short-story adaptation, made quickly for RAI tv. It opens as a train comes to a dusty town, dropping off an important passenger with a link to local history; the legend he’s come home to pay respects to now incrusted with thirty years of heroic mythmaking. But as the truth behind the tale is revealed to Athos Magnani, Jr, his famed father is shown to have feet of clay. When all is said and done, the truth of the past is buried for the present to allow legend to live and inspire the future. Or: ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,’ as John Ford had it at the end of THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE which equally fits this story outline. And, in an telltale stylistic touch, Bertolucci has the elderly survivors, friends of Magnani Senior who lived the events, play themselves in flashback in spite of being thirty years older.* And if the Borges story, adapted to Fascist Italy with a murder that didn’t come at the hands of enemies, is far removed from John Ford’s LIBERTY VALANCE/’62, the parallels Bertolucci mines in tone, structure & style are too striking not to be at least subconsciously, if not deliberately motivated. STRATAGEM can’t really compete with the fullness of vision & artistic command of THE CONFORMIST, but it’s a significant achievement on its own terms. With a narrative line both precise & vague, aided by superb touches of local color (and cuisine!), along with a remarkably rich cast. It’s lack of reputation a mystery.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *You can make the case that Bertolucci never truly recovered his form after the (false) positive reception on 1900 in ‘76.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Apparently, Spike Lee’s new film, DA 5 BLOODS/’20 (not seen here) also uses this Brechtian distancing device of purposeful age-blind casting in flashbacks. When Ford did it in LIBERTY VALANCE, with a cast mostly 30 years older than the parts they play, he didn’t ‘announce’ it with stylistic quotation marks as ‘artistic choice,’ and got slammed at the time for doddering Hollywood laziness. Only eight years having passed when Bertolucci made STRATAGEM, Ford’s film wouldn’t see its rep climb to current lofty heights for decades.

DOUBLE-BILL: Naturally, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. (Speaking of which, check out the hair style for each film’s love interest, Vera Miles and Alida Valli both with uncharacteristic cropped hair styles.)