Film

The Leopard (1963)

Director: Luchino Visconti, Goffredo Lombardi

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Prince Salina has always been the biggest cat on the block. Guys call him The Leopard. He growls, they shift ass. Now some biscuit-brain named Garibaldi wants to run the whole show from City Hall. Did 20th Century-Fox think this was the movie Visconti sold them back in l963, the way they hacked, dubbed and reprocessed? At last, 20 years later, we have the original version in a restored Technicolor print, revealing this as one of the finest 'Scope movies ever made, and Visconti's most personal meditation on history: muscular in its script, which deals with the declining fortunes of a Sicilian aristocratic clan under the Risorgimento, vigorous in performance, and sensuous in direction, changing moods through subtle shifts of lighting to give a palpable sense of the place and the hour. Lancaster, in the first of his great patrician roles, is superb; the rest of the players, right down to the hundreds of extras in the justly celebrated ball scene, are flawlessly cast, each of them living a moment of history for which Visconti, Marxist aristocrat himself, privately sorrowed.

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