The Leopard

(1963, Dir.: Luchino Visconti, with Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale)

The Leopard is Luchino Visconti’s extended (probably overextended) portrait of a man standing at the cusp of two worlds: the Italian aristocrat Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster), who is seeing the centuries-old aristocratic system founder under the tide of revolution. He knows he cannot stop it, so he makes the most of it, manipulating and engineering events to favor his more vacuous, voluptuous nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon, or possibly Cary Elwes).

The film is lushly photographed and creates a genuine sense of place in late-19th century Sicily—one can almost taste the dust kicked up from the horse-drawn wagons. But it lingers too long and, aside from the Prince himself and to a lesser extent his amusing priest sidekick, the characters are banal. The love triangle between Tancredi, the Prince’s daughter and the politically connected Angelica Sedara (the also voluptuous Claudia Cardinale) plays out in a distressingly uninteresting fashion, which is a pity because it takes up a lot of screen time.

It is really the psychological study of the Prince that saves the film—he is fully self-aware, and his knowingly futile dance with the forces of history is, in its own way, heartbreaking to watch. That Visconti himself was an avid leftist makes his rather sympathetic portrayal of the death of aristocracy all the more intriguing.