Originally famed for its sexual frankness, Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris has endured because of its sophisticated storytelling and the fine performances of its principals. Marlon Brando weaved details from his own life into the character of Paul, the world-hopping American who had finally settled into a marriage and proprietorship of a fleabag hotel in Paris. His wife's suicide sends him into an existential tailspin, however, and he winds up wandering through an apartment up for rent. Enter Jeanne (Maria Schneider), a lovely Parisian girl (she's 20 to Paul's 45) also viewing the apartment. The two find themselves making love and strike up a strange affair, carried on without names, in the apartment where they meet. (Jean-Pierre Leaud, in a somewhat Bertolucci-satirizing role), a filmmaker who wants her to be his subject and inspiration. Brando's monologue beside his dead wife has sent many a film student into a paroxysm of pleasure.