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61 out of 70 people found the following comment useful :-
A Prince among films, 21 June 2004

Author: silverwhistle (docm@silverwhistle.free-online.co.uk) from Glasgow, Scotland

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I had longed to see this film for years, having only seen b/w stills and brief clips. Finally, Glasgow Film Theatre got a new print in their Visconti retrospective in 2003, and it was certainly worth the wait!

'Il Gattopardo' is a marvellous film, a magnificently realised slice of 19C history presented through the lives of engaging but humanly fallible characters. Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is a shrewd, benevolent man of 45, trying to navigate a passage for his family through the social and political turmoil of the Risorgimento in Sicily. (I was stunned that some reviewers thought there was too much discussion of politics in the film - it is essential to the story and its context!) Burt Lancaster gives surely his greatest performance as Don Fabrizio, coming to terms with the fact that he is among the last of a dying breed: born too late to dwell in an unchanging aristocratic world, but too early to adapt fully to the modern world, unlike his nephew Tancredi Falconeri (Alain Delon). As he tells the royal envoy from the mainland: "We are the leopards, the lions; after us will come the jackals and hyenas".

Tancredi embodies the best and worst of the rising generation: he is dashing and full of vitality, but he breaks the heart of his shy, sensitive cousin Concetta (Lucilla Morlacchi), and is just as fickle in his political loyalties - although this ensures he will survive in the new Italy. His engagement to Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale), daughter of the nouveau-riche mayor, secures the family's future. Angelica is a fine example of how well the characters are drawn: no idealised romantic heroine, but a vital, beautiful girl with a vulgar streak. She laughs interminably and loudly at Tancredi's coarse jokes at the table - not how a 19C young lady was expected to behave: you sense the cringes this induces in the rest of the family, despite the fact she is 'a good catch' in material terms, and is basically good-hearted.

The other supporting characters are worth attention, delineated with affectionate humour: Angelica's social-climbing father; Princess Maria Stella (Rina Morelli), with her glum piety and fits of the vapours (one can easily believe her husband's quip, "We have seven children, but I've never even seen her navel!"); the family chaplain, Father Pirrone (Romolo Valli), with whom Don Fabrizio has amusing bouts of verbal sparring.

But it is as much the look of this film, besides the intelligent script and excellent characterisations, which makes it so special. The costumes are among the best I have ever seen in a 19C-set film. The landscape and architecture of Sicily are shown to tremendous effect: you can feel the heat, the dust. Dust? Yes - and that is one of the best things about the film: its physical realism. When the characters go on long carriage journeys, they get visibly dusty; their palaces have shabby, disused rooms and semi-derelict wings, as well as majolica floors; the all-night ball - a tour-de-force of colour and spectacle - results in a retiring-room full of used chamber-pots; the rural villages are as dilapidated as picturesque. Too many costume dramas present perpetually well-groomed characters in immaculate environments, no dirt or untidiness: 'Il Gattopardo' does not.

The film ends with Don Fabrizio walking home after the ball, having come to terms with his mortality and seen the younger generation preparing to take centre stage. If you want to meet him again in his final years, and see what becomes of Concetta and Angelica as the 20C dawns, then read Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's original novel, of which this exquisite film is a faithful and sensitive adaptation.

And to see the characters now? About the same time I first saw this film, I got a picture-book of the mummies of Palermo: fragile parchment-skin and bone in fraying 18-19C finery. The same sense of the transience of beauty, of change and mortality, pervades the mummies and the film alike: one auburn-haired youth even resembles Francesco Paolo, the Salinas' teenaged son. "Dust and ashes!" writes Browning; "Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?" says Villon. But thanks to Visconti's masterpiece, we can still see 'the snows of last year' at the point of their dissolution.

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42 out of 53 people found the following comment useful :-
A extraordinary masterpiece: see the UNCUT version., 1 February 2000
Author: Joseph Harder (jah5y@virginia.edu) from warren michigan

If you ever have the chance to see this magnificent film in an uncut, fully restored version, with good subtitles...DO IT. This is a film of astonishing beauty, bristling with ideas and magnificent performances.Like all truly great films it is full of sublime SCENES: Prince Tancredi riding off to war in his carriage., the astonishing ball sequence, when Prince Salina gazes at the painting and comes to grips with his own mortality,and the unforgettable end, when Salina kneels on the ground and speaks to the stars.Coppola, Cimino, and Scorsese all saw this film and learned from it..the Godfather echoes it repeatedly( in fact all THREE Godfathers echo it repeatedly). Scorsese once ranked it with The Red Shoes, Citizen Kane, Otto e Mezzo and The Searchers as one of the films he "lives by." Seeing it, one understands.

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34 out of 44 people found the following comment useful :-
Touches on the true meaning of aristocracy, 3 June 2003

Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

Burt Lancaster plays a true aristocrat in an aristocracy that is not an aristocracy. The degeneracy as well as the sophistication of the rival political factions in warring Sicily is shown, and the human insight of the central character that embodies true nobility, even though he is largely powerless to make his ideals reality. Garibaldi is invading Sicily with an army of a thousand, landing in Marsala and advancing through Palermo. Prince Salina (Lancaster) is a noble of a disappearing age. He refuses a place in the new senate and is unable to convince the new wave that the unification will not be good for Sicily. He is caught between different loyalties. A love story between his nephew (played by Alain Delon) and a rich merchant's daughter (played by Claudia Cardinale) interweaves the action and heightens the moral dilemmas that Prince Salina has to face. A brave film, opposing, exposing and opposed by government and church. The full length restored edition is a cinematic gem and the opulent costumes and scenery are a treasure to behold.

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35 out of 46 people found the following comment useful :-
Portrait of powerful yet reflective man, who doesn't abuse his power, 13 September 2000

Author: Peegee-3 (poetsrx@webtv.net) from Santa Monica, CA

This beautiful film, which I saw some time ago, remains in my memory as a profound study of a man in a position of power who thinks, reflects on important values, as well as his own aging process...and yet the film is never static. Burt Lancaster gave a brilliant performance...which I read was his favorite role. Visually, it is stunning. The long dance scene with Claudia Cardinale is justifiably famous...one of the sexiest scenes on film, in my opinion. To anyone interested in serious concerns, cinematically expressed with grace and intelligence, I would urge you to see this splendid film.

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34 out of 46 people found the following comment useful :-
a film that just gets better with age, yours and its own!, 18 July 2004

Author: humewood from Toronto, Canada

I was rounding off a two year study in France in 1963 and I remember gazing at the marquee of a cinema in Paris shortly after the Cannes Festival, seeing "Le Guepard" advertised, beautiful Claudia Cardinale waltzing with handsome, courtly, Burt Lancaster. At the time, I made a mental note to see the movie but in fact, saw it for the first time many years later, on a black and white TV no less! Chopped up and edited as it was, in black and white, the film moved me immensely. I was absolutely thunderstruck by the dialogue which, when I read the Prince of Lampedusa's novel shortly after, I realized had been "lifted" verbatim from the novel in large chunks. What a novel and what a worthy and noble tribute to it Visconti has paid. I now own the Criterion three disk set of Il Gattopardo and never tire of watching what is for me, one of the great films of the twentieth century. Burt Lancaster, as the Prince of Salina, was an inspired choice for the cinematic role, though apparently he was not Luchino Visconti's choice. I think the Prince of Salina is Lancaster's finest performance.

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22 out of 33 people found the following comment useful :-
The lost world, 10 August 1999
Author: matthew wilder (cosmovitelli@mediaone.net) from los angeles

Could it be that Visconti's 1963 epic--long lying in ruins until its 1983 partial restoration--is the greatest movie ever made? The real subject of this movie, surely the wisest and most beautiful of all "period pictures," is the twentieth century--what has been gained and above all what is lost. Only a Marxist duke like Visconti could have had the split sensibility, and the anecdotal knowhow, to render Sicily just before its entry to modernity with the splendor and the caginess that radiates through every frame of this masterpiece. As the prince making final compromises before leaving the faded world he has inherited, Burt Lancaster gives one of the greatest performances in movies. Possessed of both an elegiac melancholy and a shrewd, dry-eyed appraisal of the failures and the glorious extroversion of its aristocratic world, THE LEOPARD is like a dream you can't bear to let go of. Contemporary viewers will see echoes of THE DEER HUNTER, 1900 and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE--and will see those films shrivel to the size of cocktail franks.

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26 out of 42 people found the following comment useful :-
Exhausting, rewarding, 13 September 2004

Author: poikkeus from San Francisco

Luchino Visconti directed this rich, emotional, and intellectually rewarding study of the aristocracy in 19th century Sicily. Starring Burt Lancaster (his voice well-dubbed in his very best role), this would qualify as a character study if its canvas weren't so large.

As Garibaldi burns his way to a possible worker's revolution, the upper class seems to circle in a different orbit, taking vacations while the situation is at its least stable. With mutton chops beard and careful bearing, Lancaster is very much the Leopard, slyly shifting alliances when it's to his advantage. That's why his protégé (Alain Delon) is so likable to him, a young leopard certain to earn his own place.

This is more a film of character and theme, taking its time to show the contrasts between rich and poor, young and old. The famous ballroom sequence at the end of the film ties it all together with sensitivity and sadness.

The Leopoard requires some patience, but there's much to like. Fans of classic Italian cinema would be advised to seek out the full-length version.

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12 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Visconti's Italian epic provided a curious change of pace…, 6 April 2007

Author: ironside (robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from Mexico

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Visconti was widely praised for both the realism and vaguely politicized tone of his early films, and the operatic sumptuousness of his later historical costume dramas… Throughout his career, however, style dominated content; all too often, the result was a decorative melodrama disguised as solemn, socially significant art…

Adapted from an internationally popular novel by Giuseppe Tomassi di Lampedusa, it was termed a masterpiece by some and a bore by others… Certainly, it was deliberately paced, with minute attention given to period detail…

A prime example is Visconti's climactic and grandiose ballroom sequence, which seems to fill one-third of the film… But the director presented the charm and manners of a bygone era so masterfully… "The Leopard" saw a return to a long, lushly historical drama, observing an aristocratic family's reluctant but inevitable acquiescence to a son's romance with a middle-class girl, set against the backdrop of Garibaldi's unification of Italy…

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19 out of 30 people found the following comment useful :-
An ennobling experience., 23 June 2006

Author: BrentCarleton

"The Leopard" is not only one of the most accomplished films of the twentieth century, but one of the most successful adaptations of a novel to the screen. Rarely has a scenarist so effectively translated the essence of a novel without compromising the source material.

This is not to say that anyone should approach the film before the Lambedusa novel. Indeed, this film might well be considered as a companion to the book--the two being almost interdependent.

Still, the depth, richness, and complexity that Mr. Visconti achieves here justifies a lengthy treatise in and of itself. Equally important is a familiarity with the social background of the story, a piece of history destined to be lost on not a few Americans. Nonetheless, the viewer is encouraged to familiarize himself with the life, writings and allocutions of Pope Pius IX, (particularly his "Syllabus of Errors"), the campaigns of Garibaldi and Mazzini, and the criminal theft of the temporal dominion of the Papacy, effected by a variety of Socialist and Masonic cabals.

But back to Mr. Visconti's film: enough good things cannot be said of it. Often, great visual films are compared to paintings and certainly the comparison is most apt here. Each frame seems to breathe a life of its own.

One is simply staggered by the beauty of the compositions--each scenic tableaux not only intelligently employs the width of the Cinemascope screen to artistic advantage, but even manages, (as in the case, again, of a great painting) to visually probe the novel's subtext.

The casting could not be improved upon. If on paper, Burt Lancaster, seems an odd choice, (what with his Curriculum Vitae brimming with gangsters, cowboys, athletes, and acrobats) he, nonetheless fully realizes both Lambedusa and Visconti's vision, creating a man with the intelligence to see not only his own life ebbing away, but recognizing that the order he embodies, and represents is also simultaneously collapsing.

In short, Mr. Lancaster's character personifies nothing short of a tragic loss--the collapse of the noble/aristocratic and chivalric European world order, and, with it, the complex value system, and interdependent mode of decorous deportment that the value system supported, (welcome to the Welfare State, "progressivist" social engineering, and the enshrinement of the declasse.)

Though her character is tainted with arriviste origins, Claudia Cardinale enchants in her interpretation of Angelica. Note the way Mr. Visconti stages her entrance in one of the film's most memorable sequences. As the family gathers in the salon prior to a small dinner party, an anticipatory rustle signals Angelica's arrival. Framed over and through an oil lamp and spray of daisies, and underscored by a recapitulation of Nino Rota's main theme, she glides through the salon, a vision in cream taffeta, elaborate chignon, and a rose at her bosom, plainly enrapturing and even intimidating the entire party. The pitch and sincerity of her voice and diction as she greets the Prince is a marvel of growing self possession.

Miss Cardinale's beauty is of a rare order, and Alain Delon is nearly her match, with a gallantry and swagger that perfectly encapsulate Tancredi. Supporting roles from the Jesuit to Angelica's father are flawless both in type and execution.

The ball sequence defies comment. It is truly one of those things, for which the phrase, "must be seen to be believed" may be applied. The viewer can almost touch the watered silk swagged drapes, feel the swish of embroidered gowns, taste the flavored ices and blanc manges, and smell the liquored air, a waft with the heady mixture of verbena and attar of roses.

When, at the scene's near close, we behold an depleted elderly woman in green silk fanning herself in the far right side of the frame whilst some brave young things continue their exhausted dance, we seem to be viewing a Tissot come to life.

And Nino Rota must be complimented on his majestic score, the main theme of which is of heart breaking beauty and tenderness.

Ironically, "The Leopard" will scarcely find populist appeal in a country for whom MacDonalds, Wallmart, and Oprah appear to provide all that is needed or wished for. No, it is not intended to be accessible to every Tom, Dick or Harry. This would surprise neither Prince Lambedusa or Mr. Visconti.

But for those who know better--savor it! "The Leopard" seeps into one's pores like a drug, after which it demands to be seen again and again.

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18 out of 29 people found the following comment useful :-
While I feel distanced by some of the atmosphere, I don't deny it's one of Visconti's most ambitious and gorgeous films, 18 August 2004
Author: MisterWhiplash from United States

What I found most fascinating, though this would exclude the character of Fabrizio Salina (played dead-on by Burt Lancaster) and the images captured time and time again, is that The Leopard is practically a 180 from Visconti's breakthroughs. Think of Ossessione and La Terra Trema and any film buff will think of neo-realism, the plight of the under-valued, the emerging form of power in the simplest stories, the most heartbreaking images. By the time it came around to the Leopard, Visconti was still making personal movies, but here with the Leopard instead of it being a grainy black and white, full screen film set in the present and detailing the lower classes in their communities, it's a sumptuous widescreen technicolor feat telling the story of aristocracy in 1860 Italy. But, luckily, Visconti doesn't disappoint- this is a rich film, one that I may not have been able to penetrate on the first viewing, and I don't know how many viewings it will take me to do so.

The lead character, a Count (Lancaster), has to face up with the changing times- not only is an end coming to a ruling class that has been more or less on rules for about 2500 years, his nephew Tancredi (played in a wonderful early performance by Alain Deleon) is in love with a fellow Don, Calogero's (Stoppa, genuinely slimy and interesting aristocrat) daughter Angelica (Claudia Cardinale, who makes Catherine Zeta Jones seem like an every-girl in the looks and persona department). A revolution seems on the way, but it is ceased, and meanwhile the Prince sees that things are changing, but as one quotes, "things will stay the same".

The Leopard is many things- philosophical treatise on the nature of the ruling class with all that is to offer when looking down on the 'little people'; classic, novel-type love story with characters not going into the realm of soap; it's a feast for the eyes and the ears- Giusseppe Rotuno and Nino Rota turn in five of their greatest pieces of work respectively (even when a character may be talking and it may not be terribly interesting, looking at the shots that unfold is not deterring in the least). Although the drama that unfolds at times isn't as compelling as in Visconti's neo-realist efforts, and the fact that this is in another country going back nearly a hundred and fifty years (the distance as opposed to recognizability of the family in the fishing village of La Terra Trema), it is a treat to see.

And, indeed, after seeing it on a big screen (a rare occasion, thanks to the Film Forum theater in New York), it perhaps one of the finest widescreen films to come out of Italy in the past fifty years. A masterful sequence is to behold as well- the ballroom sequence, where the tones are instinctively precise. Bottom line, this is (one of) the ultimate aristocrat-turned-Marxist take(s) on 19th century Italy and Sicily. Grade: A

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