The Leopard ***** (1963, Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale) – Classic Movie Review 1243

Co-writer/director Luchino Visconti’s awesome and majestic 1963 movie interpretation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel about 19th-century Italy in dynamic transition from a collection of states into one nation boasts three wonderful international stars of the era on their most dazzling form.

Despite the odd casting, Burt Lancaster is on his most commanding form as a proud Sicilian nobleman Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, who is struggling against the tide of Italian unification. An aristocrat of impeccable integrity, he tries to preserve his family and class battered by the tumultuous social upheavals of 1860s Sicily. Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale at their most wonderfully dashing as the young lovers, Tancredi Falconeri, who is Don Fabrizio’s nephew, and Angelica Sedara.

As the wealthy ex-peasant Don Calogero Sedara (played by Paolo Stoppa) rises, the Prince refuses to act in halting the decline of his personal fortunes or to help build a new Sicily. But Tancredi makes his own position secure by marrying Don Calogero’s beautiful daughter Angelica.

Visconti conjures up a dazzling period epic that you can’t keep your eyes and ears off, overflowing as it with dinner dances, battles, opulent décor, stunning production designs (Mario Garbuglia), beautiful actors, fabulous costume designs (Oscar-nominated Piero Tosi), marvellous images by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno and Nino Rota’s terrific music.

This incredibly elegant and sensual trip though an era on the brink of cataclysmic change builds steadily but powerfully along to one of the cinema’s most celebrated sequences. Visconti’s famous climax to The Leopard is a splendidly choreographed climactic feast – a six-course movie meal in anyone’s language. This thrilling, sumptuous 40-minute ballroom scene, when Tancredi introduces Angelica to society, is brilliantly staged and exceptionally moving.

It was splendidly restored in 1983, running to its original 205 minutes, though alas an Italian voice substitutes for Lancaster’s, as his lines are dubbed into Italian by Corrado Gaipa. The reprehensible, badly cut and poorly dubbed English-language American version runs at 161 minutes, and, ironically, Lancaster’s voice is infuriatingly dubbed here too.

Cardinale is also dubbed in the Italian version – by Solvejg D’Assunta – because her native tongue is French.

It won the Palme d’Or for Visconti at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. But, thanks no doubt to the hacked and dubbed version shown in America, the critics there panned the film, particularly Lancaster’s performance. Nowadays, it has been re-evaluated and opinion is properly high, with Martin Scorsese judging the film one of the greatest ever made.

The original eight-perforation Technirama camera negative survives and was used by The Criterion Collection to create their video master for DVD and Blu-ray, with colour timing supervised by the film’s cinematographer, Giuseppe Rotunno. New preservation film elements were created using a 4K digital scan and this restoration premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

The producers chose Lancaster without consulting Visconti, who felt insulted, causing tension on the set. But the pair ended up working well together, and their resulting friendship lasted the rest of their lives, remarkable especially for two men who had reputations as being difficult.

Di Lampedusa’s novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) chronicles the changes in Sicilian life and society during the Risorgimento. Published posthumously in 1958 by Feltrinelli, after two rejections by the leading Italian publishing houses Mondadori and Einaudi, it became the best selling Italian novel ever and is one of the most admired works of Italian literature.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 1243

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