Summer Under the Stars 2011 -- Day Twenty-Five Review: Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)

I don't often finish watching a movie feeling like I would have benefited from a brief lesson on Sicilian history prior to starting it, but my advice to anyone planning to watch The Leopard for the first time is to familiarize yourself at least slightly with the decline of the aristocracy and rise of the middle class in Sicily during the 1860s, because that rise and fall makes up the entirety of the story in The Leopard, yet the film itself makes no attempt to explain the finer points of that history through the story. The director, Luchino Visconti, assumes we know the larger historical significance of the time period during which his film is set, and instead chooses to show how the decline of the aristocracy affects on man in particular, the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster), and his immediate family, including his traditional wife Maria (Rina Morelli) and his more flexible nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon). This is actually to the Luchino's credit, because it allows him to tell his story without bogging down the plot in historical detail, but it can also make watching The Leopard a confusing experience for people (like myself) whose knowledge of Sicilian history is nearly non-existent.

Fortunately, while the academic nature of The Leopard combined with the obvious language barrier (the movie was filmed in Italian, although the two lead actors -- Lancaster and Delon -- are American and French, respectively, and had their lines dubbed), the film is well-made enough to stand up to the initial befuddlement it may cause. Delon is Delon, exactly as you might expect him to be (I'm not much on early-sixties' pretty boys, including the pretty boy Visconti initially wanted for the part of Tancredi, Warren Beatty), but Lancaster is great as the Prince, full of the same quiet power he demonstrates in Judgement at Nuremberg, and Claudia Cardinale is excellent as the vivacious Angelica, striking the right balance between previously-low-class roughness and luminous beauty. The film starts off a bit slow, especially -- again -- if you don't quite understand what is going on with some of the revolutionary battles scenes, but the forty-minute climactic ball sequence that closes the film is a marvel of filmmaking, with excellent direction from Visconti and especially strong work from Lancaster. The Leopard isn't the sort of movie you want to watch when you're in the mood for something light and mindless, but it's well worth watching when you want something a bit heavier and artistic.

Grade: A-