Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 2 April

The Leopard / Il gattopardo (Visconti, 1963)

In a remark­able con­flu­ence of events, not long after we watched the legendary Burt Lancaster’s final big screen per­form­ance in Field of Dreams, I read this art­icle in the New York Times head­lined “Netflix Is Gobbling Up World Literature. What Could Go Wrong?”

While the article’s focus is on their adapt­a­tion of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, it men­tions that the stream­er also has a new mini-series adapt­a­tion of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Italian clas­sic nov­el, The Leopard.

Tempting as it may be to choose six one-hour epis­odes of prestige tele­vi­sion instead of three hours of one of the best films ever made, I thought it was time that I finally dug out the Criterion Blu-ray copy of Visconti’s 1963 film1, a beau­ti­ful pack­age that has been sit­ting in the ‘to be watched’ pile since it came out in 2010 (fif­teen years being plenty of time for it to mature like fine Italian wine).

Lancaster plays Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, pat­ri­arch of a noble Sicilian fam­ily in the 1860s, as Garibaldi and his army are mak­ing their way across the coun­try to cre­ate the nation of Italy. Salina’s head­strong but hand­some neph­ew Tancredi (Alain Delon) joins the red shir­ted rebels and gains a mil­it­ary repu­ta­tion to rival his play­boy one.

Salina is age­ing (Lancaster was only 50 when The Leopard was filmed but he plays the role like ‘Moonlight’ Graham thirty years later) and he can see the world is mod­ern­ising and fam­il­ies like his will be left behind. “We are leo­pards and lions,” he says to a bur­eau­crat who tries to per­suade him to enter polit­ics. “About to be replaced by jack­als and hyenas.”

Tancredi falls for Angelica (lumin­ous Claudia Cardinale), the daugh­ter of a rich but gauche loc­al landown­er, and Salina gives the rela­tion­ship his bless­ing, know­ing that wealth is about to trump titles in Italy’s future.

The film looks like a hun­dred mil­lion bucks – dozens of extras in battle scenes and court balls, immacu­late cos­tum­ing, end­less Sicilian vis­tas – and Visconti’s widescreen Techniscope and Technicolor com­pos­i­tion is excep­tion­al through­out. The way he uses door and win­dow frames and the depth of these huge pala­tial rooms to focus us on the rela­tion­ships between these humans while keep­ing them in their con­texts is a masterclass.

One amus­ing glitch I noticed when watch­ing the 2004 res­tor­a­tion on the giant Embassy Theatre screen was in the after­math of the Battle for Palermo when one of the act­ors play­ing a dead sol­dier sur­repti­tiously opens his eyes to check if they were still film­ing and then sheep­ishly closes them again. A goof in per­petu­ity, poor bugger.

I’m not sure wheth­er I want to risk my memor­ies of this clas­sic – num­ber 90 in the Sight & Sound top 100 films of all time – by chan­cing the Netflix series. Anyone seen it who can help? Let me know in the comments.

Where to watch The Leopard

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland, UK, USA: Digital rental

India: Not cur­rently available