“Marco Bellocchio's third film...In the Name of the Father is, of course, full of angers and socio-political comments, but again, its biographical references are authentic glimpses into the malaise afflicting certain areas of Italian education, and the growth of cynicism provoked by involvement with its doctrines. The setting is a third-rate college, where Angelo, a rich adolescent with a sardonic outlook on life is sent after having been expelled from all the best schools for insubordination. The glint of revolt is strongly discernible in Angelo's eyes, and by placing such a figure into the closed world of a Jesuit college, Bellocchio dramatizes a specific segment of rich bourgeois Lombardian society, whose youthful exponents are totally undecided about the life of the church, and suffocated intellectually by a pervasive conciliatory spirit to such an extent that they comprise a sub-proletariat without hope....” Albert Johnson, San Francisco International Film Festival, 1971