From the archive: "The Leopard"

The Italian-language equivalent of Gone With the Wind or The Godfather, Luchino Visconti's sumptuous The Leopard charts the lives and loves of a Sicilian family of aristocrats over the late 19th century. Presiding over them all is the compelling Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, played by Burt Lancaster: a character who truly considers himself unimpeachable, above the world, but in reality an arrogant, godless libertine who abandons his family to spend a night with a whore as Garibaldi's revolution breaks out and dead bodies start turning up in the back garden. Alain Delon is the Prince's adopted nephew, who takes up with the revolutionaries, but his the impetuous knack of switching sides at will; Claudia Cardinale the Sicilian aristocracy's idea of the girl next door, daughter of the clan's nouveau riche enemies, for whom Delon comes to fall.

Its influence on The Godfather in particular can be seen in the emphasis Visconti and his collaborators place upon the regime's corruption, at once personal, political and spiritual. The Leopard begins with vote-rigging and marriages of convenience, then goes on to illustrate the Salinas' various other weaknesses. They're blind: Delon returns from the battlefield with a bandage over one eye; Don Fabrizio deceives himself even as he claims to lack self-deception. They're deaf: daughter Concetta (Lucilla Morlacchi) receives a book of poems from one suitor with a monograph stating words to that effect; when Don Fabrizio gives the speech that gives the film (and gave Giuseppe di Lampedusa's source novel) its title, he's greeted with a blunt "Sorry, I didn't hear that".

Most of all, they're mute: unable to speak up at the ballot box, failing to say the right things to one another just when they need to be said. The film draws towards its conclusion with a near-legendary, hour-long ball sequence, at which - despite the magnificent costuming - examples of all three flaws are on full display. (No wonder Lancaster staggers off with a headache at the end of it.) If The Leopard is rightly regarded as one of the great book-to-screen adaptations of all time, it's for the way it manages to get the pith of the novel - its sidebars and subtexts - up onto the screen and yet remain kinesthetic, fully dramatising even the heftiest hunk of exposition.

Speaking of hefty hunks, Lancaster was never more immense; even robbed of his own voice by the dubbing, the actor still seemed to demand the Cinemascope format, prowling every corner of the frame. Delon, too, finds himself with more space to romp in - and a character that allows him more leeway for such romping. It's the actor's most playful appearance: he's clearly the jackal following in the Leopard's pawprints. Yet the film suggests each generation is doomed to be undone by their forefathers' weaknesses; the curse of stupidity falls on those at one end of the social spectrum, that of entitlement at the other, and all are bound to perish scarcely more enlightened than when they first entered this world. The more things change, the more they stay the same; the Leopard never quite shucks those spots.

The majority of epics are intended as serious but rousing affairs, intended to send an audience back out onto the street after two, three, four hours so caught up in a fictional world that they want to know where those characters go next. Halfway through Visconti's film, Don Fabrizio voices his belief that humankind has barely a couple of centuries left, and indeed the film's final line - "Now we can take it easy" - suggests a complacency that will be particularly conducive to extinction. Other epics would get bolder and more expansive the longer they went on, but The Leopard turns out to be a very modern, neurotic epic in which the director eventually contracts the screen space down to one blind alley, through which his main character apparently disappears for good.

(October 2004)

The Leopard is rereleased in selected cinemas from Friday.