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Italy

The Leopard is in color so those of you who don't like black and white can watch it without feeling the effects of color deprivation. It begins with several pans across a huge Italian villa. Cut to a small prayer group in a massively lavish room. Prince Don Fabrizio Salina {Burt Lancaster} is leading the prayer. As the meeting draws to a close, one of the servants enters and notifies the Prince that a dead soldier has been found in the garden. The servant also has a letter that informs him that his friends have fled and that Garibaldi has landed at Marsala.

As he reads the story, Paolo, the serving girl {Carlo Valenzano}, begins to cry. The Prince's reaction to this is to tell her she'll be moving to the palace in Palermo that very evening. Apparently disappointed by the news, Paolo runs off down the hallway in tears. Unmoved, the Prince tells his son, Francesco Paolo {Pierre Clémenti} to call Mimi, which Paolo does right away. In another room, the serving girls all work at calming down poor Paolo, who's having something of a panic attack. This irritates the Prince enough to go off in search of Mimi himself. After running around the house giving orders, Fabrizio lets those assembled know that he'll be going to Palermo as well. When he explains to Father Pirrone {Romolo Valli} that the Father will be accompanying him, the man seems to be about as pleased at the news as Paolo was.

The Prince demands that dinner be served in half an hour, then struts from the room, after which poor Paolo and the Priest commiserate and say their prayers. Cut to the garden where the servants complain about the smell of the dead soldier and the camera does a slow zoom on the lifeless body. Cut to the carriage on its way to Palermo and the grim faces of the Prince and the Father as they sit side by side. While they ride, they watch fires in the mountains, argue, pass through checkpoints and the Prince makes a short stopover at a "friends" house. The morning after their arrival at the palace, Tancredi {Alain Delon}, the Prince's nephew, interrupts Fabrizio's shaving to tell him that he's going off to join the fight against the King. The Prince counters this by telling the young man that he's mad and that the people he's going to take up with are mafioso and trouble-makers.

As Tancredi leaves, his uncle hands him a handful of money, to subsidize the revolution, and he gets to kiss all of his relatives and say goodbye to Concetta {Lucilla Morlacchi}. This goodbye does end up being something of an epic event. Once it's over, we cut to the Prince and the Priest discussing Fabrizio's tryst of the night before. Fabrizio explains the problems he has deriving satisfaction from his "virtuous" wife which seems to upset the Priest just a bit. The two go on to have a slightly heated discussion of class warfare and what's happening to the upper classes in Italy "today".

Cut to a nicely assembled, but extremely chaotic, battle between many people in red shirts and what basically looks like many civilians and a few of the King's men. The Redshirts hold an impromptu firing squad and some of the women hold an impromptu hanging after which the cavalry is just plain slaughtered. Cut to the Prince and the Priest back in their carriage. From here on in, this movie remains fairly chaotic. It's easy enough to follow in film but just a bit difficult to relate here. This is long and lavish and basically chronicles the rise of the middle class and the re-unification of Italy during the Risorgimento. What's strange about this is that this film focuses almost exclusively on the lives of the aristocracy. It doesn't really give us much of an idea of what the conditions of the lower classes are, with the exceptions of the few servants and a couple of trips into town. These people seem to exist in a world of their own outside the battles; most of the war comes to us through occasional newspapers or visits from soldiers, politicians and clergy.

This seems strangely dry to me. I'm thinking that's due to the subject matter portrayed. Most of that subject matter is the upper crust of Italy in the eighteen hundreds and the then contemporary mores and customs don't really allow them a lot of opportunity for action. The characters and actors are great but the roles themselves seem to be restricted by the need for accuracy and defined manners of behavior. On the other hand, Visconti has used enough poetic license here to give the characters some sense of life and some of the violations of those customs and mores make for a few of the more lively and humorous moments of the film. The performances from everyone involved are lovely; Lancaster does a bang up job through most of this, Cardinale makes for a pretty wonderful Angelica and Delon comes up with a nicely credible Tancredi; even if he does seem to be a fan of Errol Flynn's films.

The sets in this film are beautiful; there's very little footage that doesn't contain several Objet d'art. Maybe I'm looking at things with eyes filtered by modern day antique and art dealers prices but, given that all of the furnishings and art in these palaces would have have to have been hand-crafted, I have a hard time understanding where even small kingdoms might have come up with the sort of "old money" that these people seem to take for granted. I'm relying on Visconti's reputation as a Neo-Realist to believe that this is at least a reasonably accurate picture of the old nobility. The Leopard is maybe a bit over-long and it moves fairly slowly. Despite that it makes for a pretty interesting historical style film. Don't expect sweeping drama. Do expect a pleasant story with many subtleties that's very capably told. At one hundred and sixty minutes long, you will need to set aside some time for this.

Nino Rota