The legacy and reputation of Bernardo Bertolucci is brilliant and yet complex: he was one of the giants of European cinema, a thrilling anti-fascist combatant of postwar culture, a liberation theologian of the movies who strove to understand the competing demands of radical Catholicism and Marxism on the left. He was a contemporary of Fellini, Visconti and Pasolini who created a distinctive kind of Italian new wave with his brilliant early films Before the Revolution (1964) and The Conformist (1970) but was able to translate that prestige into Hollywood success in a way few European film-makers were willing or able to.

This he did with his colossal and multi-award-winning epic The Last Emperor (1987), produced by Jeremy Thomas. It was the story of the tiny child who was China’s final potentate as the Maoist revolution arrived, poignantly isolated in the obsolete trappings of power, and Bertolucci had unprecedented permission to film inside The Forbidden City in Beijing. If Bertolucci ever felt anxiety that he himself could be one of the last emperors of highbrow cinema, the male creator imperiously laying down the law, he certainly never showed it.

He certainly lived long enough to see the traditional prerogatives and prestige of the alpha-male auteur become challenged – and to see his most famous work Last Tango in Paris (1972) become reviled in two different eras, and for different reasons. The sexually explicit story of a middle-aged man (played by Marlon Brando) and his obsessive affair with a younger woman (Maria Schneider) contained scenes of emotional abuse and sex in which the element of consent was ambiguous to say the least. It was first attacked on release on conventional moralistic grounds and duly defended in the context of freedom, permissiveness and the sexual revolution. Pauline Kael said it was the most important cultural event since Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The cultural battle lines of the reactionary right and the progressive left were pretty clearly drawn.

But in 2016, a video surfaced of Bertolucci suggesting that the infamous scene in which Brando’s character brutally penetrates Schneider’s using a stick of butter was improvised ­but planned in advance by Brando and the director without telling Schneider, because he wanted her humiliation to look real and to be real. Two powerful men were in effect conniving in the assault of a younger woman. Disgust was widespread. I wrote that my own analysis of the film, which emphasised the “balancing” effect of Brando’s character later asking to be penetrated by Schneider using her fingers, now clearly had to be reassessed. There was no balance.

The eroticism resides in something other than mutual liberation and exploration, although the toxic potency of male self-hate and self-destruction is still real, and I still think it is a powerful film. For his part, Bertolucci remained impenitent, and earlier this year, at an event to mark the restoration of Last Tango at the Bari international film festival, he pointedly announced that Ridley Scott should be “ashamed” for replacing Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in his movie All the Money in the World, and that he would like to work with the actor.

Bertolucci was not a director who responded to the #MeToo movement with strategic silence or contrition or self-questioning, still less an emollient attempt to reconcile the liberal intentions of his work with interpretations of sexism and arrogance in his career. He clearly felt that as an old soldier of the movie business, he didn’t have to explain himself. In fact, he made a weary and worldly appearance in the documentary Seduced and Abandoned (2013), all about the difficulties faced by older and unfashionable men in the cinema industry – directed by another disgraced figure, James Toback.

Yet none of this expunges the memory of his brilliance and his audacious creativity. His Before the Revolution, made when he was just 22, is an exhilarating mix of erotic and political possibility – though of course of a distinctively male sort, contemplating the new and contradictory demands of Catholicism and Marxism. In The Conformist (1970), Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a young closeted gay man from a well-to-do background who tries to fit in, to conform, by joining the fascists. It is a movie whose themes of violence and loyalty were clearly influences on Francis Ford Coppola, but also had a distinctively patrician languor, and sense of high tragedy and anguish. (The movie was based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, whose own work was a remarkable stimulus to film-makers: Godard’s Contempt, De Sica’s Two Women and Kahn’s L’Ennui were also based on his books.)

Bertolucci’s 1900, released in 1976, was a gigantic Euro-epic of a high-minded and hubristic sort, almost Wagnerian in its magnitude, about two friends from opposite ends of the social spectrum, played by Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu. It was sprawlingly long, the subject of bitter disputes between the director and the veteran producer Alberto Grimaldi, who had worked with many of Italian cinema’s greats and done his own part in promoting the cult of the egomaniacal director. The film did not have the focus and pertinence that people valued in Bertolucci, and has been a little forgotten – though is perhaps ripe for reassessment, as has happened with Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate.

La Luna (1979) marked a return to sexually transgressive themes, although this movie is considered to have dated and his controversial qualities now look a little quaint. His later, Nabokovian film Stealing Beauty (1996) is similarly vulnerable to criticism as a very male kind of rapture at young woman’s beauty. However, The Last Emperor (1987) was a massive but atypical epic for Bertolucci, a huge monument closer to the David Lean style that Richard Attenborough had revived in the 1982 mega-prizewinner Gandhi, although Bertolucci’s movie did not feature big stars. With nine Academy Awards, it was the film that cemented his prestige and gave him a crossover clout in Hollywood in ways that most European directors of his vintage could only dream of (or indeed disdain). It was a very impressive and satisfying film with an authentic pioneer spirit.

Among his later films, The Sheltering Sky (1990) was a literary adaptation with John Malkovich and Debra Winger as an American couple who come to north Africa on a trip to rekindle their marriage. For me, it is notable and even remarkable, for the enigmatic cameo from Paul Bowles, the author of the original novel, reflecting on the nature of humanity. This is still one of the great literary cameos in film history — on a par with Graham Greene in François Truffaut’s Day for Night.

My favourite later Bertolucci is his sprightly and sensuous The Dreamers (2003) with a script by the great British film critic Gilbert Adair, adapting his novel The Holy Innocents, a story about les evenements of 1968 and the birth of the French new wave. His final work was the spirited, minor coming-of-age two-hander Me and You (2013).

Bertolucci was a great film-maker, but undoubtedly one of that generation who was clouded by the #MeToo movement and it is sad, but perhaps inevitable, that he could not find it in his heart to engage with these new ideas. Perhaps he thought he was too old, too battle-scarred to grovel, to kowtow to a new set of objectors and that this was a fad that would evaporate like all the others, to leave undamaged the eternal verities of Art.

Last Tango in Paris is now a subject for debate as much as reverence. It retains the power to shock, but also to put moviegoers into an eerie trance, especially in that inspired final shot of the last thing Brando’s character sees before dying. Admirers will also go back to the lavish pleasures of The Last Emperor and to the fierce intelligence of The Conformist and Before the Revolution – intense memories of his revolutionary nonconformism.