Visconti’s three-hour film of Lampedusa’s novel is as good as its reputation, and Burt Lancaster’s Prince is the reason. It is slow in stretches that do not earn it and the Palermo fighting is a pageant, but the ball that closes it is worth the wait.
Luchino Visconti’s film of Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa’s novel opens in Sicily in the spring of 1860, with the household of Prince Fabrizio Corbera of Salina (Burt Lancaster) at their evening prayers while a servant finds a dead soldier in the garden. Garibaldi has landed. The Prince’s nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) rides off to join the rebels, telling his uncle that if they want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. The Leopard is Visconti’s account of how an aristocracy survived the end of its world by marrying money and calling it patriotism. It is as good as its reputation, and it is long in ways that are not always earned. We recommend it warmly, with a comfortable chair; it runs 186 minutes.
Lancaster is why it works. He was an odd choice on paper for a Sicilian prince, and he plays Fabrizio almost entirely through carriage: the way he fills a doorway, the way he lets a hand rest on a table while a lesser man talks. Watch him shaving while Tancredi talks politics behind him, or listening to Father Pirrone (Romolo Valli) fret about his soul in a carriage on the road to Palermo, where the Prince is going to see his mistress. He is amused, tired, and never in doubt of his own weight.
Giuseppe Rotunno shoots the island in widescreen as a country of dust and bleached stone, and he shoots the villa dark, shutters half closed against the heat, so the family seem to live in the gaps between bars of light. Mario Garbuglia’s rooms are full and slightly shabby, with the paint going on the ceilings. The scene that got us came sooner than we expected. The family cross the island to Donnafugata and go straight from the carriages into the church, and they sit in a row grey from head to foot with road dust while the townspeople stare. They look like the effigies on their own tombs. Nobody says so, and Visconti holds the shot long enough that nobody needs to.
Delon’s Tancredi is charm with nothing behind it, and Delon knows it: the smile arrives a half-second before any feeling would. Claudia Cardinale enters as Angelica in a dress Piero Tosi has cut a little too grand for a country dinner, and she laughs at a coarse story of Tancredi’s with a loud, open laugh that stops the table. Concetta (Lucilla Morlacchi), the Prince’s daughter, who loves Tancredi, watches it happen. Paolo Stoppa is the best of the supporting cast as Don Calogero, who turns up in tails when everyone else is in ordinary dress and cannot understand why the footmen are smiling. He is a small greedy man, and the only person in the film who works.
The last hour is a ball in a Palermo palace, and it is the sequence everyone talks about, rightly. Visconti runs it at the speed of a real party: arrivals, introductions, girls shrieking on a sofa, old men asleep in chairs, the Prince drifting from room to room. Mario Serandrei cuts it slowly and lets Nino Rota’s waltzes play out at full length, and Rotunno lights the gilt so it glows while the faces sweat. We were moved more than we expected by a shot of Lancaster alone in a library, looking at a painting of a deathbed and then at himself in a glass. Nothing has happened to him. He has understood something, and Lancaster lets us watch it arrive.
Not all of it is at that level. The street fighting in Palermo early on is staged like a costume pageant, extras falling in tidy groups while Giuliano Gemma’s general addresses the camera. The middle stretch at Donnafugata, taking in a plebiscite, a hunting trip and a long wait for a letter, is where the length tells, and for twenty minutes we were admiring the wallpaper. Rina Morelli’s Princess is given prayer and tears and little else. Five writers are credited, Visconti among them, and the film sometimes says a thing twice.
Visconti had made angrier films about the poor and would make more morbid ones about the rich. This is the one where his politics and his taste are in the same room and agree, and we think it is his best. Watch it in Italian with subtitles if you can, and in one sitting: the ball only lands on someone who has already been up all night with the Prince.
