The Leopard - Criterion Collection
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Movie Reviews of The Leopard - Criterion Collection
Movie Review: Trading a book's intimacy for an epic's grandeur
Summary: 5 Stars
The Leopard, the novel, portrays a pensive Don Fabrizio reflecting on his position in a changing world. The film, on the other hand, portrays the changing world in which Don Fabrizio is thinking. This is not wrong. A film overwhelms the senses and excites where a book naturally leads to thought and examination. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuan said, and a different medium often delivers a different message.
So, is the novel better than the film? No! This film is the best kind of adaptation, one that interprets the book, complements and stands alongside it. Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio is an inspired choice, as is Alain Delon as Tancredi. Claudia Cardinale is lovely, but she fails to command Angelica's fullness; she's not nearly as seductive as she is in, for instance, Once Upon A Time In The West. But Angelica shines, radiates, glows! next to Don Fabrizio's wife and daughters, so the actress does her job, and well.
The Leopard has been called Italy's Gone With The Wind and it is indeed contemporaneous with Margaret Mitchell's story. But they shouldn't be compared. Don Fabrizio is no Rhett Butler nor is Angelica a Scarlett O'Hara; conversely though, Georgia and Tara are no match for Sicily and Palermo. The antebellum American South looked enviously on Europe while Europe never cared much for the colonies; the New World was nouveau-riche while the Old World's new revolutionaries cared for, but respected, Europe's inherited treasures.
All in all, a marvelous movie.
Vincent Poirier, Dublin
Movie Review: The Italian Gone With the Wind
Summary: 5 Stars
The Leopard - Criterion Collectionfascinating look at Italian unification and an often overlooked opinion of same.Movie Review: "If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change."
Summary: 5 Stars
"We were the leopards, the lions, those who take our place will be jackals and sheep, and the whole lot of us - leopards, lions, jackals and sheep - will continue to think ourselves the salt of the Earth."
The Leopard may have bankrupted its producers and helped bring about a crisis for Italian cinema (sadly not dealt with in the generally impressive documentary on Criterion's three-disc NTSC DVD), but it's the kind of magnificent commercial failure that has managed to long outlive many a contemporary success. The lavish and hugely expensive adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's revered novel was never going to be an easy sell: an epic drama about the gradual decline of the aristocracy set against the mid-19th Century unification of Italy that was supposed to bring prosperity and progress to Sicily but only made things worse - all that is really happening is that the middle class will quietly take the place of the aristocracy - was never going to be an easy sell in Peoria. The politics of the Risorgimento can even confuse Italian and Sicilian audiences, and it has to be said that the film plays better if you've done a little homework on the period beforehand and can appreciate the constantly shifting political landscape (the Criterion DVD handily provides a brief historical primer). It should also be emphasised that this is a very Sicilian drama rather than an Italian one, with a bleak Sicilian outlook on events. As Burt Lancaster's Prince Salina explains, "Sleep... eternal sleep, that is what Sicilians want. And they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring them the most wonderful of gifts. And, between ourselves, I doubt very strongly whether this new Kingdom has very many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really a wish for death. Our sensuality, a wish for oblivion. Our knifings and shootings, a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is... for death again."
Yet rather than a purely political essay, the film assumes a more universal resonance through Burt Lancaster's increasingly weary Prince, a man in danger of outliving his time and facing the mortality of himself and all that his life has stood for, trying to manage events to secure some kind of legacy of continuity and stem the tide of social progress, reasoning that "If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change." The vehicle for his hopes and aspirations is not one of his own children but his nephew. Alain Delon's Tancredi at first appears as a (literal) mirror image of the Prince, but he's a more ruthless political animal than even he is aware of, able to adapt his passions to the changing political circumstances and rewrite his past until he has become the polar opposite of everything he once professed to stand for. While it is the Prince who consciously manipulates events, he remains a strangely sympathetic, even tragic figure: for him, it's to late to change. Instead, it's the charismatic Tancredi who becomes increasingly unlikeable as he throws away his early enthusiasm and promise in favor of the easier path of conformity. The film becomes an elegiac tragedy not just for a time and a class but for human nature itself: change for the better is impossible because these people will not let themselves change.
One of the very best discs Criterion ever produced, the transfer does full justice to Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography, Mario Garbuglia's sumptuous production design and Nino Rota's magnificent score, far exceeding any of the European releases of the film, but it does lose points for not including any of the deleted scenes from the 205-minute version that originally opened before Visconti cut it to his preferred 185-minute version presented here. It's especially frustrating since the stills gallery includes a few images from deleted scenes without any explanation of where they originally fitted in the narrative, while there are brief glimpses of some in the Italian theatrical trailer also included. It seems an especially curious oversight since the set does include the shorter US version of The Leopard, which, notwithstanding its poor reputation, is far from negligible. Despite losing a further 24 minutes, it surprisingly isn't a bowdlerization and it's good to hear Burt Lancaster using his own voice, taking a softer voiced, more underplayed approach than the actor who dubbed him in the Italian version (something Sydney Pollack, who supervised the US dubbing, feels was a misjudgment on Lancaster's part). In many ways, the tightening of the film seems to actually make it more focussed on the turbulent politics that would fail Sicily but protect the immediate interests of the old order. The Italian version is still superior, of course, but it's not at all bad.
As well as boasting not only the best transfer I've ever seen of the film (especially compared to the Italian DVD) but possibly the best DVD transfer of any film I've seen to date, Criterion's 3-disc edition boasts an excellent extras package. Only the interview with producer Goffredo Lombardo is carried over from the Italian disc, with pride of place going to an excellent 61-minute documentary on the making of the film, a useful 13-minute primer on the historical background of the film, two Italian newsreels - including an incredibly bitchy and gossipy one from the Italian Nastri Awards - the original Italian trailer and the woefully misjudged US trailers selling it as another Longest Day or Cleopatra!
Movie Review: Quite possibly the most beautiful film ever made
Summary: 5 Stars
If this edition of "The Leopard" has done nothing else, it certainly has displaced Kubrick from the top spot of my personal list of best directors and put Visconti in his place instead. Why is that? Well, I had seen the movie previously, but in a version with strangely oversaturated, incredibly ugly colors (and that version is included here as an extra on one of the three discs, perhaps to serve as a bad example -- so if you have a masochistic bent...). I still felt, based on the writing and acting, that this was a very good movie, but visually it was not exactly a treat on TV.
Enter Criterion, and while they always do a good job with transfers, this time they have truly outdone themselves! The film looks simply amazing, with subtle lighting, a nice golden "glow" in the interior scenes in the palace and very naturalistic colors in the outdoor scenes. Watching this transfer is a bit like marveling at one of the first DVDs about a decade ago and wondering how you could ever have tolerated the bad picture quality of VHS. The difference is really that striking. And yes, the story is interesting, the acting is very good, but even if that were not the case this film would be mandatory viewing simply for how it looks.
Where Kubrick comes into play is of course when one compares this film to his very similar offering, Barry Lyndon, which I previously regarded as the most-striking looking period piece. Soft lighting, glowing fabrics, careful composition, these things are present in both films. But what makes "The Leopard" better is its unerring sense of good taste -- where Kubrick shows off his zoom lens, overdone lighting in night scenes, or Ryan O'Neal's complete lack of acting talent, Visconti is all subtlety and elegance and there is nothing here which seems overdone. Well, maybe except Lancaster's makeup, but then again he is supposed to look lion-like. (And the Italian-dubbed voice definitely helps a lot for making his look seem fitting -- it projects far more authority than his real voice ever could.)
One of the gripes I have with IMdB is that The Godfather (Widescreen Edition) is rated so highly, when it is little more than an inferior, morally questionable knockoff of this movie. Hopefully more people will watch the real thing and realize that "The Godfather" is polyester next to "The Leopard"'s pure silk. And of course Bertolucci's 1900 (Special Collector's Edition), again with Lancaster in a relatively similar role, seems to be heavily influenced by this film. So the number of copycats for this work is quite significant.
Now the only question is why, until now, there have always been such great transfers of Kubrick's films and such excessively bad ones of films by Visconti. If Visconti's other films received a similarly careful treatment as this one, I am sure the balance between him and Kubrick would be tilted even more in his favor.
Somehow I hope a few young directors also watch this movie and use it as an inspiration for their work (maybe along with Carn?'s "Children of Paradise"). Why do current Hollywood films all look either grotesquely ugly or kitschy or otherwise repulsive? Isn't art supposed to be all about creating beautiful things? Would it perhaps be possible to go back to producing artistic, gorgeous-looking films like this one?
Movie Review: The Gone with the Wind of Sicily
Summary: 5 Stars
This is sort a cult classic, and until fairly recently was hard to find in a decent copy. This sumptuous edition is excellent. We have hardly any movies that we own: Lawrence of Arabia, Gone with the Wind, Les Enfants du Paradis, and The Leopard. It's one of those movies we can watch countless times and always see/learn something new.