Il Gattopardo (The Leopard). 1963. Italy. Directed by Luchino Visconti. Screenplay by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli, Visconti. With Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna in association with Pathé, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Twentieth Century Fox, and CSC-Cineteca Nazionale. Restoration funding by Gucci and The Film Foundation. In Italian; English subtitles. Restored by Cineteca di Bologna in association with Pathé, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, Twentieth Century Fox, and CSC-Cineteca Nazionale. Restoration funding by Gucci and The Film Foundation. 185 min.
Martin Scorsese, founder of the Film Foundation, has described Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard as “one of the greatest visual experiences in cinema.” With operatic grandeur and an exquisitely Proustian attention to 19th-century period detail and atmosphere, Visconti adapts Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel about a Sicilian prince at the end of the Risorgimento (the Italian unification) who through political cunning ensures the survival of the old aristocratic order in the face of revolutionary ferment and moral decay. Justly celebrated for its breathtaking ballroom sequence, the film features brilliant performances by Burt Lancaster, never better as the august Prince Fabrizio of Salina (and bearing no small resemblance to Visconti himself); Alain Delon, as his calculating nephew Tancredi, who goes off to join Garibaldi’s forces; and Claudia Cardinale, as the ravishing daughter of a rich bourgeois.