Exciting news!! I just read in The Wall Street Journal weekend edition that my all-time favorite movie (before BBM came out of course) The Conformiste is just now available on DVD!! The WSJ calls it, "some of the most ravishingly beautiful images ever projected on the screen." The movie is set in Fascist Italy and stars Jean-Luis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda!! There are short interviews with the director, Bernardo Bertolucci, and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro as well. And a cut scene, where blind people are at a party in a basement, has been restored.
Bertolucci recalls in the article that the movie debuted in the US at the New York Film Festival in 1970. The next day, he inquired when the movie would be opening nationwide and was told that it wouldn't be offered to theaters because "It's not a film for American audiences." Francis Coppola and other directors wrote letters of protest after which it was shown sporadically, but then it disappeared for 36 years!!
This will be great news in our family because, in order to see the movie, I had to haul out my Sony Betamax and try to hook it up Frankenstein-wise to the DVD player and then to the TV monitor!!