The Leopard

Director: Luchino Visconti

1963 / 186min / 35mm

Visconti, a committed communist with a taste for lavish luxury who also happened to be a titled Count of the Milanese aristocracy, depicts the overtaking of the class into which he was born by an ascendant bourgeoisie in his opulent adaptation—shot in the colors of burnished old gold by DP Giuseppe Rotunno—of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published novel of the same name, set in c.1860 Sicily, starring a regal Burt Lancaster as Don Fabrizio Corbera, the down-on-his-luck Prince of Salina, and Alain Delon as his hotheaded, opportunistic nephew, a blue blood who’s thrown himself behind the cause of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his redshirts in fighting for a new, unified Italy that finally proves no more egalitarian than the old one. “Casts an intelligent spell—intelligent and rapturous… Everything comes to us physically. Visconti suggests Don Fabrizio’s thoughts and feelings by the sweep and texture of his life… Full of marvellous, fluid set-piece sequences.” —Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

Distributor: Janus Films

Part of The Memory Palace