The Spider's Stratagem (Strategia del ragno) Bertolucci drew inspiration for The Spider's Stratagem from a Jorge Luis Borges' short story, The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, as well as his own deepening interest in Freudian psychoanalysis.
Bertolucci's protagonists in this period are frequently at odds or struggle to make their peace with mysterious or otherwise problematic father figures. So it is with the character of Athos Magnani Jr., who travels to the town where his father, a venerated anti-Fascist hero of the Resistance whose name he shares, was assassinated. The unsolved three-decade mystery of his father's murder occasions a deeper existential crisis in Athos.
Alida Valli co-stars as the enigmatic Draifa, conveying both the Patrician haughtiness and latent neuroticism of her role as The Countess in Visconti's Senso (1954). Bertolucci weaves his beloved Giuseppe Verdi (that other famous son of Parma) into the plot with telling references to Rigoletto. (Bertolucci makes similar use of Verdi's Macbeth in the closing scenes of Before the Revolution, while A Masked Ball is more explicitly woven into the drama of 1979's La Luna.)
Bertolucci locates The Spider's Stratagem very specifically in the landscape and folklore of his native Emilia-Romagna; a region the director would exalt in his 1976 historical epic, 1900. Produced in the same year as The Conformist, the film also marked his maturing creative relationship with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
