Last Tango in Paris: Can it arouse the same passions now?

When Last Tango in Paris premiered on the closing night of the New York Film Festival, in the autumn of 1972, it was an immediate succès de scandale. In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael proclaimed the film a landmark to rival the first performance of The Rite of Spring in Paris, in 1913. "This must be the most powerful erotic movie ever made, and it may turn out to be the most liberating movie ever made," she wrote. "[Bernardo] Bertolucci and [Marlon] Brando have altered the face of an art form."

Ticket touts did a roaring trade. Some critics responded in rhapsodic fashion. Others professed themselves disgusted. There may not have been riots (as there were with The Rite of Spring), but the Village Voice carried talk of walkouts by board members and "vomiting by well-dressed wives".

That was only the beginning. Over the next year or so, as the film was released around the world, it provoked court cases and censorship rows while turning into a massive box-office hit. The Brits especially relished the scandal that surrounded what the News of the World called "the sexiest, frankest picture ever made... the sex film to end all sex films". Meanwhile, Mary Whitehouse, the campaigner for morality and decency, was as outraged as everyone expected her to be when the British Board of Film Classification gave the film an "X" certificate after cutting a mere 10 seconds of the film. "Art? No, it's a licence to degrade," complained the Labour MP Maurice Edelman.

The distributors, United Artists, were even sued by a 70-year-old former Salvation Army social worker called Edward Shackleton for breaching the Obscene Publications Act. The same debates about art, obscenity and freedom of expression that had raged during the Lady Chatterley's Lover trial, in 1960, raged all over again.

In Italy, the situation was even more vexed. Heavyweight academics and public figures mulled over the merits of the film. The novelist Alberto Moravia and the Jesuit theologian Domenico Grasso held "a dialogue" in Corriere della Sera in which they argued that the sex scenes were not gratuitous. Even so, one Italian court gave the stars, producer and director suspended jail sentences.

Accusations of exploitation came from within the production itself. Maria Schneider, the 20-year-old actress characterised by the director Bertolucci as "a Lolita but more perverse", has never disguised her feelings that her director took advantage of her. "We both felt like we have been manipulated. Even he [Brando] felt manipulated, raped by Bertolucci. He rejected the movie for many, many years," Schneider said in a recent interview.

All the while, the film continued to rake in money. Its success had some unlikely side-effects. A French producer called Yves Rousset-Rouard had been planning to make a historical epic about the downfall of Marshall Pétain. His colleague and co-financier Alain Siritzky noticed that Last Tango was doing sensational business. He was sceptical that the French public had much appetite for movies about old soldiers such as Pétain, and thought that a film that capitalised on Bertolucci's success would be a much better idea. Thus was born the first Emmanuelle film.

Watch Last Tango today, and you can't help but be slightly surprised by the trail of controversy it left in its wake. An intense psychodrama about a middle-aged man who has a destructive affair with a woman 25 years younger than him, the film is self-evidently serious in intent. Paul (Brando) is a grief-stricken 45-year-old American in Paris whose wife has just committed suicide. ("All it took for you to get out was a 35-cent razor and a tub full of water," he rails at her corpse.) Jeanne (Schneider), a 20-year-old Parisienne who dresses like a Gallic Annie Hall, is on the verge of marrying a narcissistic and superficial film-maker (Jean-Pierre Léaud.)

Right from the outset, from the images of Francis Bacon paintings accompanying the credits to the jarring early scene of Paul alone under a railway line, there is a gloom and morbidity at the core of the storytelling – a tragic undertow. Bertolucci likened Brando to "a dying elephant, condemned from the first close-up."

The sex scenes may have sold the movie, but they are (at least initially) cold and brutal. "Brando celebrates the entrails, the viscera, the dark knowledge of human beings turned inside out, like the figures in the Francis Bacon paintings that form (a little too self-consciously) the visual theme of the film," Molly Haskell noted in an early review.

Neither character knows the other's name. Brando forbids his young lover from asking any personal questions, or from telling him about her own life. In his grief and self-loathing, he wants to debase both himself and her. It is as if he feels that degradation is the route to truth – only by stooping to the most primal level can he escape the contrivances and falsehoods of a society he hates.

One of the ironies is that Brando gives one of his most intimate and seemingly revealing performances while playing a character who tries to keep everything about himself concealed. He improvised some of his lines, drawing on his childhood experiences. It is clear that Bertolucci moulded the character around him: "I told him, Marlon, please try not to be the Marlon Brando from the Actors Studio, with all the divine mannerisms. I would like you as you are."

The casting was crucial. Had Bertolucci made Last Tango – as he had originally intended – with the French actors Jean-Louis Trintignant and Dominique Sanda, it is hard to see how the film would have become the international phenomenon that it did. This wasn't a case of a Hollywood name running to Europe to repair his reputation once all the roles dried up back home. Brando made Last Tango in the wake of one of his biggest successes – The Godfather. He had been curious about Bertolucci after seeing The Conformist. Even if he was being well paid (he reportedly received $250,000 upfront, and 10 per cent of the film's gross above $3m), it was a bold and risky project.

Perhaps what is most impressive about the performance is that he doesn't try to make the audience like his character. Paul is a boorish, self-obsessed middle-aged man, preying on a much younger woman as a way of exorcising his own grief and self-pity. But there is a romanticism here, too. Inevitably, the longer he spends with Jeanne, the harder he finds it to stick to his own rules of no involvement, no commitment.

"This is a movie that people will be arguing about, I think, for as long as there are movies," Kael wrote back in 1972. Three decades on, as it is re-released, Last Tango in Paris remains a fascinating case study, but Kael's remarks appear a little overstated. Was this really the "most liberating film" ever made? Does the debate about it continue? By contemporary standards, the sex scenes no longer seem extreme.

It is easy to spot Last Tango's lasting influence. Whether in the work of Catherine Breillat (Romance, Anatomy of Hell), or in such films as David Mackenzie's Young Adam and Patrice Chéreau's Intimacy, Bertolucci has opened the way for film-makers to explore sexuality in a frank and probing fashion without being labelled pornographers.

But Last Tango would struggle to find a mass audience today. After all, this is an uncompromising art-house film from a revered European auteur. The idea that such a film could play for years on end in London cinemas is nowadays unthinkable. Nor is there much sense that audiences have the energy to get as worked up as they did in 1972, when even the film's detractors at least had passionate opinions about it.

'Last Tango in Paris' is reissued from 13 July on limited release