LEOPARD, THE

SYNOPSIS:
In the Two Sicilies of 1860, Fabrizio Corbero, the Prince Of Salina (Burt Lancaster) tries to uphold the old way of life as civil war threatens to change it forever. His dashing nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) dashes off to fight with Garibaldi, who is attempting to unite all of Italy into one nation. On his return, the penniless Tancredi falls in love with Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the voluptuous daughter of a vulgarian snob who is richly endowed with olive groves. Fabrizio knows that a marriage will compromise the family name, but with the aristocracy already in decline, the pragmatic patriarch realises that such a union will shore up the family fortune and forestall its inevitable fall.

Review by Keith Lofthouse:
Unwinding slowly, inexorably, like Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s complex political novel on which it is based, The Leopard is the film most often described as Visconti’s masterpiece: a richly literate, solemn but sumptuous historical epic that ironically laments the downfall of dynasties and the rise of the bourgeoisie. After Laurence Olivier declined, 20th Century Fox only agreed to finance the project if an American appeared as the imperious Sicilian patriarch, but when the poorly dubbed and badly butchered 165 minute English version was first shown in1963, the director disowned it.

Twenty years later, seven years after Visconti’s death, a faded, full length “director’s cut” was released but only now can it be seen restored to its original glory. Still, it must be said that what is glory to some may be gloom to others. To complain that the film is “too long” is to say that a Puccini opera would be better “without the songs,” but inevitably the film has its detractors: those who question its political ambiguity, those who quibble about the suitability of Lancaster as a Sicilian prince - a leopard is centre piece in the family coat of arms - or grizzle about the gorgeous, grandiose ballroom scene that occupies the last hour.

For the most part, Visconti was painstaking in his attention to detail, most consciously when the family, defying the turmoil around them, retreat to their summer palace by convoy of horse and carriage over the sun-baked landscape. They arrive, caked in dust and dirt to sit - the last bastion of faded aristocracy - like a row of stone on a long cathedral pew. Flaws emerge when Garibaldi’s red-shirted revolutionaries swarm into the streets of Palermo for unconvincing scenes of hand-to-hand battle with the Bourbon soldiers. They seem to be played in slow motion, with no urgency on the faces of men facing mutilation or death; a little girl caught in the conflict between gunfire and sword disappears and the piazza is full of bloodless, breathing corpses. In a rousing call to arms, Tancredi asserts: “If we want everything to stay as it is, everything must change,” and yet during the fighting, the handsome adventurer, nursing a head wound, is seen only in a long or medium shot and emerges without a scar.

Lancaster based his performance on his own impressions of Visconti, himself a Marxist-aristocrat. He is often reserved, melancholy, impatient and dismissive, cruelly of his plain and prudish wife (“How can I find satisfaction with a woman who makes The Sign Of The Cross before every embrace!”) and more so of Angelica’s bumptious nouveau riche father Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa) whom he tolerates with utter contempt. But he is never more human than in the ballroom scenes when, giddied by the swirl of fine wine, smiling dancers and giggling girls, he scours the opulent hallways for a retreat and stumbles into a loo full of chamberpots - where all men (and women) are equal. Finally alone in the library, he gazes on a Grueze painting, Death Of A Just Man and begins to realise his own mortality and the inevitable demise of the ruling class.