by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Luchino Visconti
CAST: Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Paolo Stoppa
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh
PLOT: The Prince of Salina, a noble aristocrat of impeccable integrity, tries to preserve his family and class amid the tumultuous social upheavals of 1860s Sicily.
Visconti’s intimate epic The Leopard evokes the spirit of so many other films, in all the best ways, that it’s hard to know where to begin.
It’s epic in scope and intimacy, like Doctor Zhivago. The opulent costumes reminded me of Amadeus, and the lush scenery reminded of Barry Lyndon. The final ballroom sequences must have influenced the wedding party in The Deer Hunter. The literate screenplay refining tons of background exposition resurfaces in movies like JFK and Nixon. The theme of a grizzled older man facing his own obsolescence is echoed in scores of Westerns from The Wild Bunch to Unforgiven to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
In short, The Leopard takes bits and pieces of many of my favorite films and consolidates them into an absorbing movie that held my interest from beginning to end, despite its esoteric setting: Italy during the tumultuous years of the “Risorgimento,” when the aristocratic ruling classes were faced with extinction as the middle classes rose up, rebelled, and created a democratic Italy.
We first meet Prince Don Fabrizio Salina (Burt Lancaster) as he and his extended family are attending vespers in an upstairs room of their palatial mansion. Their ritual is interrupted by sounds of commotion and argument coming from outside the room; turns out the dead body of a soldier has been found in the garden. (In retrospect, this seemed to me an elegant metaphor for the entire rest of the film: a family’s stability and comfort in ceremony and formality being interrupted by outside forces intent on tearing down the old order in favor of the new.)
The dead body is forgotten very shortly amid the return home of a beloved nephew, Tancredi Falconeri (the dashing Alain Delon). His return is short-lived as he intends to leave and join the middle-class army under General Garibaldi. Meanwhile, Prince Salina comprehends the way the wind is blowing in his country and befriends a man, Don Calogero Sedara (Paolo Stoppa), who USED to be in a lower class, but who is now on the same social footing as the Prince himself. As the newly instated supervisor of elections, Sedara wields considerable power in the imminent new society on the horizon, and the Prince knows what must be done, despite his misgivings.
From there, The Leopard evolves into a vivid tapestry of life in the rustic Italian countryside, set among some of the most beautiful Tuscan/Sicilian backdrops I’ve ever seen. Some of the exteriors, showing seas of wheat or olive groves with peasant workers in the foreground, looked like museum-quality oil paintings. Some soapy material is introduced, but it never panders, never descends into schmaltz. For example, Tancredi falls in love with Don Sedara’s daughter, the luscious Angelica (Italian knockout Claudia Cardinale), at the expense of breaking the heart of Concetta, one of Prince Salina’s daughters. We watch as the Prince boldly strides into a seedy quarter of town to visit the rundown apartment of his mistress. When his priest rebukes him for this transgression against his wife, the Prince explodes: “What do you want from me? I’m a vigorous man. I can’t be content with a woman who crosses herself before hugging me! …I had seven kids with her. You know what? I never saw her navel!”
While this dialogue is both funny and not, it highlights the way the Prince has always viewed himself: as a man of noble birth whose behavior is no one’s business but his own, regardless of morality or social niceties. But this same man is intelligent enough to know which way the wind is blowing and how to modify his behavior accordingly.
Everything concludes with a magnificent ball held by a neighboring nobleman, attended by “anybody who’s anybody” including the Prince, his family, Tancredi and Angelica, and literally hundreds of others, decked out in some of the greatest costumes I’ve ever seen on film. During this lavish party, some final decisions are made, and the Prince contemplates what will happen to him and his family, and his entire class, after his death. The live orchestra plays several waltzes and dances by the one and only Nino Rota, the scorer for Coppola’s The Godfather and numerous Fellini films. As a result, yet another great film is evoked: as the celebrants dance in a line and weave their way throughout the great house, I was reminded of the famous ending of Fellini’s 8½ [1963] and its conga line of circus performers.
Some time ago I read Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Goldfinch. While it didn’t deliver breathless thrills like a Crichton technothriller, it was nevertheless engrossing. The language of Tartt’s prose transported me into the world of her hero and his morally complex journey like few other books had before or since. That’s exactly what happened with The Leopard. I expected it to be a “spinach” movie [good for you, but yucky taste], so my expectations were a bit low, despite its massive reputation in film circles. But, like the other Visconti film that I’ve seen [Rocco and His Brothers, 1960], it breaks free of the mold I had created for it and becomes something grand and operatic. I have a slight issue with the very final scene (I was hoping for something a little less open-ended), but if you have the patience for it – and if you don’t mind watching Burt Lancaster overdubbed into Italian – The Leopard is a treasure worth digging for.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 