Recently, when going through boxes from storage, I found back my VHS copy of The Leopard (Il Gattopardo, 1963, based on the novel by Tomassi). I have long been an admirer of Italian cinematographer Luchino Visconti (Boccaccio ‘70, The Damned, Death in Venice), yet I haven’t seen this film in maybe fifteen years. So, it was about time I revisited this jewel. It features an incredible international cast including Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon and Terence Hill. Enjoy the rich Technicolor, the luscious lights, the sumptuously saturated colors, the thick shadows, and the overwhelming straw yellow, sand and dust, and the parched earth of the island’s countryside! Marvel at the period detail, the rococo ballrooms, the splendid catholic costumes, the hilarious mustaches! We even view a “déjeuner sur l’herbe (lunch on the grass),” very much like an impressionist painting (well, save Manet’s scandalous female nude).
Set in Sicily during the Risorgimento (19th-century Italian unification), the three-hour historical epic chronicles the decline of the local nobility. When the story begins, an aristocratic family prayer is rudely interrupted as a dead soldier is found in the estate’s garden: Garibaldi’s revolutionary forces have landed in Sicily, in Prince Salina’s backyard! These are times of revolution and resistance ... “brutti tempi” ... On the barricades and in the streets idealistic fervor battles with murderous defiance, tricolor nationalism struggles to overcome parochial loyalties, republican forces fight royalist troops, leopards and lions replaced by jackals and hyenas. The local prince demonstrates persistence in the face of fear and terror ... “Se volgiamo che tutto rimanga com’ è, bisogna che tutto cambi (If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change),” a young hothead idealist proclaims. But soon the Bourbon royal house must flee Sicily and make way for the Savoy Vittorio Emanuele.
The heart of the story revolves around the marriage of Don Tancredi, the hothead idealist nephew of Prince Salinas, with Angelica, the daughter of the local homo novo (“nouveau riche” or upstart, if you prefer), Don Calogero. The wedding symbolizes the new order: the marriage of the old nobility with the newly rich. Meanwhile, we witness the Sicilian aristocrats struggle in languishing anxiety with their uncertain future, with their age-old distrust for Northern Italians. What will happen to the Church in a Republic? Will it lose its riches and its hold over the poor (which it bribes with alms and scares with infernal damnation)? Should the nobility deal with the bourgeois Liberals in order to survive? Can a leopard change its spots to save its skin?
Claudia Cardinale’s first entrance, however, is absolutely phenomenal ... She is for all I know female beauty epitomized! The whole room is dumbfounded in admiring silence ... What a stunningly breathtaking beauty! She is such a seductively sly wench, she could get any man to do exactly as she wishes, have them grovel at her feet in obedient adoration. (And I would be first in line!) What a beauty, Angelica! (And what an appropriate name, for such a devil in disguise!) Just as all present at the traditional first night dinner in the Donnafugata estate, an opulent affair, we gawk at this divine demoness, this evil temptress with her heaving bossom, flirting delightfully with Tancredi! What an undying beauty!
The last forty-five minutes of the movie is one of the most magnificent cinematic experiences you’ve ever had: a lavish, glorious, conspicuous ball to celebrate as if for one last time an age that has passed. An Elegy for Nobility, if you will. It is also Angelica’s beaming debut into aristocratic high society. The prince reasons that all the cousin marriages have been morally degenerating his noble lineage. It’s good, in other words, that new blood is coming into his aristocratic house. But what is really happening is that he is madly lusting after Angelica, despite his upright formality. He keeps telling her how beautiful she is, he’s entirely captivated, thoroughly under her spell. So, he contemplates death and his own mortality. The Age of the Nobility has died – and this angelic vision of sexual desires run rampant embodies a new, modern age that has just begun. Angelica knows exactly how to take advantage with her seductive charm. “Nobody could ever resist your beauty,” the Prince tells her. Amen.
Set in Sicily during the Risorgimento (19th-century Italian unification), the three-hour historical epic chronicles the decline of the local nobility. When the story begins, an aristocratic family prayer is rudely interrupted as a dead soldier is found in the estate’s garden: Garibaldi’s revolutionary forces have landed in Sicily, in Prince Salina’s backyard! These are times of revolution and resistance ... “brutti tempi” ... On the barricades and in the streets idealistic fervor battles with murderous defiance, tricolor nationalism struggles to overcome parochial loyalties, republican forces fight royalist troops, leopards and lions replaced by jackals and hyenas. The local prince demonstrates persistence in the face of fear and terror ... “Se volgiamo che tutto rimanga com’ è, bisogna che tutto cambi (If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change),” a young hothead idealist proclaims. But soon the Bourbon royal house must flee Sicily and make way for the Savoy Vittorio Emanuele.The heart of the story revolves around the marriage of Don Tancredi, the hothead idealist nephew of Prince Salinas, with Angelica, the daughter of the local homo novo (“nouveau riche” or upstart, if you prefer), Don Calogero. The wedding symbolizes the new order: the marriage of the old nobility with the newly rich. Meanwhile, we witness the Sicilian aristocrats struggle in languishing anxiety with their uncertain future, with their age-old distrust for Northern Italians. What will happen to the Church in a Republic? Will it lose its riches and its hold over the poor (which it bribes with alms and scares with infernal damnation)? Should the nobility deal with the bourgeois Liberals in order to survive? Can a leopard change its spots to save its skin?Claudia Cardinale’s first entrance, however, is absolutely phenomenal ... She is for all I know female beauty epitomized! The whole room is dumbfounded in admiring silence ... What a stunningly breathtaking beauty! She is such a seductively sly wench, she could get any man to do exactly as she wishes, have them grovel at her feet in obedient adoration. (And I would be first in line!) What a beauty, Angelica! (And what an appropriate name, for such a devil in disguise!) Just as all present at the traditional first night dinner in the Donnafugata estate, an opulent affair, we gawk at this divine demoness, this evil temptress with her heaving bossom, flirting delightfully with Tancredi! What an undying beauty!The last forty-five minutes of the movie is one of the most magnificent cinematic experiences you’ve ever had: a lavish, glorious, conspicuous ball to celebrate as if for one last time an age that has passed. An Elegy for Nobility, if you will. It is also Angelica’s beaming debut into aristocratic high society. The prince reasons that all the cousin marriages have been morally degenerating his noble lineage. It’s good, in other words, that new blood is coming into his aristocratic house. But what is really happening is that he is madly lusting after Angelica, despite his upright formality. He keeps telling her how beautiful she is, he’s entirely captivated, thoroughly under her spell. So, he contemplates death and his own mortality. The Age of the Nobility has died – and this angelic vision of sexual desires run rampant embodies a new, modern age that has just begun. Angelica knows exactly how to take advantage with her seductive charm. “Nobody could ever resist your beauty,” the Prince tells her. Amen. 
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