A Film With A Fatally Flawed Storyline.

"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."-J Cocteau
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Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) is a film where the primary storyline is fatally flawed.

1) The protagonist, the civilian Clerici, is apparently the one who first approached the Fascist secret police with the plan to covertly infiltrate the group around the exiled dissident, Prof Quadri, so why did the secret police add a higher profile this simple plan by assigning a secret agent "babysitter", Manganiello, to the mission? A "babysitter", who was not very "low profile" at all in his clumsy and obvious attempts to tail Clerici around Paris.

2) Once the secret police decide, even before Clerici's arrival in Paris, that it is better just kill Quadri rather than to have Clerici infiltrate his group, then why use a volunteer civilian agent like Clerici at all, as opposed to a professional hitman agent like Manganiello?

3) The actual scene where Prof Quadri and his wife are murdered is just a big unexplainable "hole" in this storyline altogether.
a) Where did these other secret agents come from? Their presence in Paris comes out of nowhere in the storyline.
b) How did these extra agents know about Prof Quadri's trip to his mountain resort? There is no evidence in the story of any prior contact with Clerici or Manganiello with this group.
c) How did the car with the agent that blocked the road perfectly coincide on that long road with the location where the other agents were hiding in the woods?
d) Why were so many agents needed to kill a college professor and his wife?
e) Why did the agents inefficiently kill Qruadi by stabbing him multiple times with a knife when one gun shot would've done the trick?
f) How could trained agents have allowed Quadri's wife to escape into the woods, thereby requiring an unnecessary chase after her?
g) Why hide this band of agents in the woods at all, when they all could've been in the car that blocked the road?
h) If this group of agents were the ones to kill Quadri and his wife, then why were Clerici and Manganiello even there, other than as bystanders?

4) The sudden change of plans to just assassinate Quadri, rather than to use Clerici as a mole to elicit information from him, and the subsequent assassination of Quadri without the involvement of Clerici whatsoever, makes the protagonist of this film virtually a nonentity, a superfluous character, to the main thrust of the storyline, namely, the Fascist secret police in Italy dealing with the exiled dissident Prof Quadri in Paris.

This basic failure of the storyline makes the otherwise elaborate production of this film quite superfluous. This film has great cinematography, elaborate sets, intriguing symbolism, and effective innovative nonlinear editing all for NOTHING, in my opinion, because it was all just WASTED on a poorly thought out main storyline. All the fancy packaging doesn't compensate for a lousy gift, and that's what the viewer gets with this film.

That this film received any awards at all, much less an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, again confirms for me the irrelevance of film awards altogether.

However much the poorly thought out storyline of this film conforms to the novel from which it is adapted is meaningless to me, because every film, whether a literary adaptation or not, must stand on its own merits and this film clearly does not.