The Leopard

The film’s main decision is subtractive, and right. It ends at the ball and the walk home at dawn, drops the novel’s last two parts, and leaves the Prince’s death foreseen rather than shown. Most of what remains is required. The dead soldier in the garden brings the war inside the house in the first minutes. The falsified plebiscite and Don Ciccio’s confession on the hunt are the political argument in small. Angelica’s laugh at the Donnafugata dinner is the new class breaking into the old room. What gives: the Palermo street fighting runs longer than its function, which is to show Tancredi changing sides; the lovers’ wandering through the palace’s empty wings repeats its point; the journey to Donnafugata takes in more ceremony than it needs. These are long stretches of a long film, not idle parts, and they hold the figure where it is.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a revolution can be a transaction. The old class survives by joining the new one, marrying its money and lending it its name, and what changes in the state changes so that nothing important changes in who owns the land. Tancredi gives the principle its famous form, that everything must change if things are to stay as they are, and Italian politics has named it after the title ever since. The film adds the man who sees the bargain, arranges it himself and knows it ends him; and a second disclosure, of the body, a man in his forties feeling death in a ballroom of young dancers. Image carries both as much as speech: Don Calogero’s tailcoat, the chamber pots, the Greuze. Held below the top because much of the disclosure is Lampedusa’s, and the film carries it more than it deepens it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and mostly elegiac. The film opens on the wind in the curtains of Villa Salina and the rosary murmured as the camera moves through the rooms. The family enter the church at Donnafugata grey with dust and sit in their pews like statues. The hunt crosses the burnt hills. Then the ball rises again and again: the Prince alone in the library before a painting of a deathbed, the waltz with Angelica as the room stops to watch, and the walk home at dawn, the kneeling as the viaticum passes, the words to the morning star. Nino Rota’s score gives lyric height without insistence. Held where it is because the middle at Donnafugata is for long stretches a comedy of manners, and the battle in Palermo is spectacle rather than elevation.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The archetype is the old king at the end of his line, who chooses his heir, blesses the usurper’s marriage and goes out to meet his death, with the leopard of the family arms kept before us as its emblem. The structure bears part of it. The Prince gives Tancredi his place and his blessing, asks for Angelica’s hand on his behalf, and at the ball dances with the bride as if in a rite of succession, then walks out alone. The waltz is also the dance of death and the maiden: age and youth, desire and its end, in one figure. The particular stays particular, a Sicilian family, an actual plebiscite, a real palazzo. What holds the figure is that much of the myth is evoked rather than built: the deathbed painting, the star, the viaticum and the falling order are emblems laid around the story more than structures the story is.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is double: the historical super-production, with American money, an American star and a battle in the streets of Palermo; and Visconti’s own road from neorealism, which had already turned to the Risorgimento and to colour in Senso (1954). The turns are real. The climax of the historical epic is a party, not a battle, and the party is given great length; the hero of a Risorgimento picture is a Bourbon prince who arranges his class’s survival; the revolution is shown as a deal. The stake was large: a costly production, at a length its American distributor cut. What holds this axis lowest of the twelve is that the swerve was taken on a path Visconti had opened nine years before, inside the most expensive of inherited forms, and its departures are of emphasis and proportion more than of grammar.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is what it is to outlive one’s time. The ball is the instrument, and its duration is the knowledge. A long sequence in which nothing happens to the plot but the Prince’s tiredness lets the viewer feel the hours pass as he feels them: the heat, the dancing, the full chamber pots in a closed room, the girls on the sofa, the young men who will run the new state. Told in ten minutes it would be a party; told at this length it is an era ending in real time. The widescreen frame holds the Prince small inside rooms that outlast him, and the ending at dawn completes the form: the death is never shown, only walked toward. What holds the figure is that the first two hours use the epic’s inherited grammar, handsomely, as container rather than instrument.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Sixty-three years of return are the evidence. The questions stay open and argued: whether Visconti mourns the aristocracy or indicts it; how a Marxist aristocrat’s portrait of a prince sits with a Gramscian reading of the Risorgimento as a revolution without the peasants; how the film reads Lampedusa, cutting the ending and with it the novel’s last judgment; whether Lancaster’s Prince is Visconti; what the Prince’s desire for Angelica is. The restoration of 2010 and the return of the Italian version renewed the criticism, much of it on colour, design and duration. The form yields on return, in rhymes of the opening rosary and the closing viaticum, of the dead soldier in the garden and the deserters shot at dawn. Held at the figure because much of the yield is pictorial and historical, and the central meaning, once stated, is stable.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Released in 1963, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the historical epic a means of analysing history as a class settlement, and proved that a super-production could be built on duration, interior time and a ball. It is a culmination more than a reorganisation. The decade was moved by the New Wave, Antonioni, Bergman and Fellini, and this film stood beside them as a great work in a grand inherited form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1963; a lasting model for the period film as social anatomy and for the ball as its set piece, with Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976) in the line of the Italian historical fresco; and a political term taken from its title, shared with the novel. The reach lies mainly within one genre and one kind of set piece.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric across sixty-three years. The form survives whole: the Italian version has been restored from the original elements, and the film as released is complete and legible. The charge is an altered version. For years English-speaking audiences saw a cut, dubbed film of about 161 minutes in poorer colour, which stood in for the original in their circulation until the Italian version was restored and widely issued. That replacement was regional, is now repaired, and costs a tenth. Presence is continuous: repertory, television, home video, teaching, the restoration’s return to festivals and cinemas, a Criterion edition, and beyond cinema the political use of its title, though much of that presence belongs to the novel. The surface is the 1860s, made with archival care, and it ages as period rather than as fashion.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Giuseppe Rotunno’s photography in Technirama gives the rooms their depth, the ball its candlelit warmth and the exteriors the heat of Sicily. Mario Garbuglia’s design, real palazzi and Piero Tosi’s costumes make the period a lived world rather than a dressed set. Rota’s score and a waltz by Verdi carry the ball. Burt Lancaster’s Prince, slow, ironic, physically heavy and then tired, is the film’s centre and one of its era’s great performances; Paolo Stoppa’s Don Calogero is comedy that turns into power. The staging of the ball, hundreds of figures moving through connected rooms around one man’s passage, is a feat of direction. The charges: the whole cast is post-synchronised and the leading voices are not the actors’; the Palermo battle is staged in the inherited manner; the middle at Donnafugata moves slowly in places.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the street fighting in Palermo, with its barricades and a woman shot at a window, and the Prince alone before a painting of a deathbed in a quiet library at the ball. One law governs both. History passes the Prince by while he watches it, and violence and decorum are one settlement at two moments: the fighting that makes a new state, and the party where its owners meet. The comedy of Don Calogero’s tailcoat, Father Pirrone’s errands and the family’s rituals obeys the same law, manners as the form in which power changes hands, across a range from comedy to death and from battle to ballroom. The strain is at two places: the Palermo battle keeps the epic’s rules more than the Prince’s gaze, and the lovers’ passage through the palace leans toward a romance the film otherwise holds at a distance.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Judged on what a film of about three hours holds. The state, in the war, the plebiscite, the Senate and the new army. Class, in the aristocracy, the rising bourgeoisie and the peasants. The family, in a marriage of convenience, a disappointed daughter and a pious wife. The church, in the rosary, Father Pirrone and the viaticum at dawn. The body and death, in the Prince’s ageing; desire, in Angelica, Tancredi and the Prince himself; history, in the Risorgimento; the natural order, in Sicilian heat, drought and land. The plot joins them: the marriage, the vote and the ball are one transaction. What holds the figure is the people. Peasants and townsfolk are seen from the carriage and the church step, labour appears only as land, consciousness is the Prince’s alone, and the inner lives of Concetta and Maria Stella are only glimpsed.

Score: 8.4 / 10