Handsome Marcello Mastroianni became not only the face of Italian cinema during the 1960s but also the on-screen face of its political consciousness — and that’s saying something. Mastroianni could be noble or common; he looked cool in sunglasses and could be attractively anguished as he romanced many of the great European film beauties or won the fondness of working-class male filmgoers. He was the John Wayne of Italy’s highbrow and popular film traditions. Today’s Hollywood (from Clooney to Pitt, Washington to Baldwin) has no equivalent.

Of the many highpoints in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s "Il Bello Marcello" series, (showing through May 31) it is Mastroianni’s role as Meursault in Luchino Visconti’s 1967 version of Albert Camus’s The Stranger that underlines contemporary cinema’s failure.

Mastroianni was the John Wayne of Italy’s highbrow and popular film traditions.

Bringing Camus’s defining 20th-century novel to the screen, Visconti revisited his own commitment to social consciousness. It’s a solemn adaptation, but when continental Meursault/Mastroianni confronts the colonized Moroccans who sullenly bear their oppression, Visconti briefly evokes the magnificent equanimity of his masterpiece La Terra Trema (1948). He interrogates Camus’s famous tale of existential destiny with his own interest in the fate of both rich and poor.

The Stranger is flawed (Visconti and Mastroianni teamed more effectively in the 1958 film of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights), but this restoration of a classic, which preserves Giuseppi Rotunno’s sun-bright colors and the rich grain of photochemical cinematography, raises important questions about art and politics.

Are students in "safe spaces" still taught Camus? Do they contend with the dangerous way in which political issues now overtake moral accountability, at times leading to the demise of morality? Mastroianni and Visconti make that inquiry in the scene where Meursault confesses his feelings, with his face half-hidden behind a ledge — great movie-star acting. It is Mastroianni and Visconti’s sympathetic, ultra-European perspective on a white man being tried in a French colonial court that makes The Stranger an important study on the existential nature of racism. (Mastroianni and Visconti were the first mainstream filmmakers to address this unnamed issue since William Wyler and Bette Davis’s The Letter.) Now, Mastroianni and Visconti’s venture into Western political conscience is still fascinating 50 years later.