The Spider's Stratagem (Strategia del ragno) (1970)

100% of critics liked it
(7 reviews)
79% of users liked it
(495 ratings)

Originally produced for Italian television, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem (La Strategia del Ragno) can be regarded as a cinematic tone poem. Adapted from a Jorge Luis Borges short story, the film stars Giulio Brogi as a young Italian who returns to his ancestral home -- the place… More Originally produced for Italian television, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem (La Strategia del Ragno) can be regarded as a cinematic tone poem. Adapted from a Jorge Luis Borges short story, the film stars Giulio Brogi as a young Italian who returns to his ancestral home -- the place where his anti-fascist father was assassinated, a long-ago incident that still disturbs the populace. Cold-shouldered by everyone in town, the young man tries to find out why everyone is so hostile towards him; after all, was not his father a hero of the people? In some (but not all) ways, The Spider's Stratagem is a precursor to Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, delineating the correlation between sex and political ideology. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Rating, Runtime: Unrated, 1 hr. 37 min.
Directed By: Bernardo Bertolucci
Genres: Drama

In Theaters: Aug 1, 1970 Wide
On DVD: Oct 17, 1990

Critic Reviews

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
It's a movie with a beautiful cinematic grace, a way of establishing atmosphere and furthering plot without a lot of talking.
Don Druker, Chicago Reader
[Features] sumptuous visuals and sense of high tragedy.
, TV Guide's Movie Guide
Aesthetically, the film finds Bertolucci in a transitory mode, caught between his early Godard-influenced abstraction and his later style of lush, operatic camera movements and theatrical use of color and music.
, Time Out
Full of mysteries, omens, ambiguities, and signs of incipient madness, and it resolves itself into a riddle that is the cinema's richest homage to all that's remarkable in Borges.
Cole Smithey, ColeSmithey.com
Strictly stunning.
, Film4
Much of it is intriguing and the photography (by Storaro), sometimes evoking the paintings of De Chirico, is memorable.

Read all 6 critic reviews

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Stephen M

Originally made for Italian television but released theatrically, The Spider's Stratagem, Bernardo Bertolucci's follow-up to his dazzling The Conformist is no less ambitious, for all its humble origins. Adapting Jorge Luis Borges'… More
Originally made for Italian television but released theatrically, The Spider's Stratagem, Bernardo Bertolucci's follow-up to his dazzling The Conformist is no less ambitious, for all its humble origins. Adapting Jorge Luis Borges' Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, Bertolucci transposes the setting from Ireland to Italy, making his protagonist the son of a martyred anti-fascist leader rather than the great-grandson of a martyred Irish republican. As its title would suggest, Borges' original story - brief but bursting with ideas - examines the nature of heroism and treachery, presenting the case of a man who might be considered both hero and traitor at one and the same time and revealing why, once having discovered the identity of the assassin, a blood relation might be compelled of his own free will to hold his silence. Minor themes include history's propensity for repeating itself and the phenomenon of art influencing real-life events. Miraculously, not only does all of this survive translation to the screen intact, Bertolucci further enriches the story by blurring the identities of his lead character and the father whose death he is investigating. Besides utilising clever editing, giving the two men the same name (Athos Magnani), emphasising their physical similarity and having a single actor play both parts, the director achieves this effect most brilliantly with the introduction of Alida Valli's character, Draifa, the murdered man's former mistress; mentally unbalanced, forever trapped in 1936, the year her lover died, she is unable to separate the past from the present, the father from the son. So successful is Bertolucci in creating this disorientating, dreamlike texture, by the time the film draws to its enigmatic conclusion we are beginning to question, not whether or not Magnani, Jr. is capable of ever leaving the village where Magnani, Sr. died - which, frankly, has been in doubt for some time - but whether we ever saw him arrive in the first place, whether he hasn't always been there in one form or another.
Eric B

Decades later, Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) returns to the small town where his same-named father -- an anti-fascist hero -- was assassinated in 1936 while watching an opera. The conspirators were never caught. Brogi also portrays the father in flashbacks. A red neckerchief… More
Decades later, Athos Magnani (Giulio Brogi) returns to the small town where his same-named father -- an anti-fascist hero -- was assassinated in 1936 while watching an opera. The conspirators were never caught. Brogi also portrays the father in flashbacks. A red neckerchief distinguishes the latter, to avoid confusion. The young Magnani hopes to solve the murder, but the story doesn't go much further than this. The plot doesn't have enough twists and clues to be called a "whodunnit" and, surprisingly, there isn't much of a romance element either. Magnani spends most of his time just walking in contemplation and trading words with his father's ex-mistress (Alida Valli) and three closest friends (they are now elderly but still intimidating). Bernardo Bertolucci directed "The Spider's Stratagem" the same year as his masterpiece "The Conformist," but this film is nowhere near as good. It does have rustic Italian settings and lots of slow, lateral tracking shots. What it doesn't have is a cast with any screen charisma. The script is adapted from a Jorge Luis Borges short story, "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero."