Arguably Luchino Visconti's best film and certainly the most personal of his historical epics, The Leopard chronicles the fortunes of Prince Fabrizio Salina and his family during the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Based on the acclaimed novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, published posthumously in 1958 and subsequently translated into all European languages, the picture opens as Salina (Burt Lancaster) learns that Garibaldi's troops have embarked in Sicily. While the Prince sees the event
as an obvious threat to his current social status, his opportunistic nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) becomes an officer in Garibaldi's army and returns home a war hero. Tancredi starts courting the beautiful Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), a daughter of the town's newly appointed Mayor, Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa). Though the Prince despises Don Calogero as an upstart who made a fortune on land speculation during the recent social upheaval, he reluctantly agrees to his nephew's marriage, understanding how much this alliance would mean for the impecunious Tancredi. Painfully realizing the aristocracy's obsolescence in the wake of the new class of bourgeoisie, the Prince later declines an offer from a governmental emissary to become a senator in the new Parliament in Turin. The closing section, an almost hour-long ball, is often cited as one of the most spectacular sequences in film history. Burt Lancaster is magnificent in the first of his patriarchal roles, and the rest of the cast, especially Delon and Cardinale, become almost perfect incarnations of the novel's characters. Filmed in glorious Techniscope and rich in period detail, the film is a remarkable cinematic achievement in all departments. The version that won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival ran 205 minutes. Inexplicably, the picture was subsequently distributed by 20th Century Fox in a poorly dubbed, 165-min. English-language version, using inferior color process. The restored Italian-language version, supervised by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, appeared in 1990, though the longest print still ran only 187 minutes. ~ Yuri German, Rovi
The feeling at the end of this masterpiece -- a profound meditation on mortality, really -- is so pitch-perfect and conveys so many complexities at a very simple level that The Leopard has become one of the greatest of all epics.
The Leopard is more than a tad too pleased by its own spots, but in this case the source material and its director's intentions were almost accidentally an appropriate match.
Two-plus hours of engrossing machinations and opulent scenery point the way to the pièce de résistance: a 45-minute gala scene that the Almighty himself would approve as a luxuriant prelude to the Rapture.
Visconti died in 1976, but Rotunno went on to supervise the film's restoration in the 1990s and this new print can now be seen in all its sumptuous widescreen glory.
There have been plenty of movies about the conflict of the old and the new, but none seem to contain the whole world in their scope the way that The Leopard does.
Luchino Visconti's The Leopard is just as fantastic as I've always heard it was. I picked up the Criterion Blu-ray of this a while back and I'm just now getting around to watching it. An absolutely lush film with big open landscapes and vistas as the backdrop to a story about the old generation succumbing to the new.
I've only seen the Italian version of this (more or less the director's cut), and the one thing I really missed was Burt Lancaster's voice. It grabs hold of you when he speaks and you want to hear everything that he has to say, so judging his performance via an overdub was a little bit tricky. It's fabulous, of course, as is the rest of the cast's. The film is also a bit of an art film without a clear-cut story. The visuals are vastly more important than the story, I think, but the performances are so good that it doesn't matter. Everything about it is striking. Most will complain about having to read subtitles or sitting through its leisurely three hour running time, but if you can invest yourself in it, you'll find The Leopard to be a very beautifully melancholy work.
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