Customer Reviews
visconti's wisest vision of the western culture - By: Dr. U. L. Khawaja, 17 Sep 2008 
If i had to chose one movie as representing the greatest western movie of alll times this will definitely be my unanimous choice .
it discusses state,religion & the ordinary people in the guise of the Garribaldi rebellion in Sicily but is a very true account of the human existence since beginning of time.
The essence of the theme is that something has to change for nothing to change in entirety ,in this case it is the aristrocratic order being disguised as a political regime by the italian intervention .
Burt Lancaster is the wise prince who represents the aristocracy & the state with Alain Delon as his impoverished nephew who is obliged to marry the daughter of an upstart politician who represents the nouveau rich new order.
Claudia Cardinale is magical as the daughter who realises she is only a pawn in the game but has to convince her self with lies about being in true love with Delon ,their relationship is kept deliberately low-key & mysterious & you keep wondering if they are in love or just in a charade.
The celebrated waltz & dinner in the Palermo palace of a sicilian princess is the focal point where alll the socio-political issues & the class differences are beautifully exploited by visconti in the most memorable sequence lasting almost 30 minutes -the balllroom sequence is filmed as an epic which is only equallled by the scene from russian version of war & peace .
The individual waltz between burt & claudia is magnificently filmed & can be seen as many times as you want like alll great art.
The same is true for the lavish production & magnificent visuals as well as the perfect musical score .
The locales include the magical sicilian vistas with it's ancient hills ,vineyards & mansions & the decor looks immaculate in every detail.
Ultimately visconti suceeds in making that perfect masterpiece where style & content amalgamate in unison to create a unique & great piece of art.
The movie neither preaches nor corrects it's flawed characters who are alll imperfect human beings but just observes humanity as it streams past in it's everyday struggle for existence in it's imperfection but inevitable course ,it is not concerned with good or evil but rather with the ground reality of humanity & the vision becomes universal in it's wisdom .
A movie for alll times & ages with burt lancaster giving his best performance ever & the same is true about Alain delon too,as for claudia she was born to play the sicilian beauty who is most desired & yet a very lonely woman at heart .
The dvd has no english soundtrack & it is best seen with english subtitles as it is meant to be & there are numerous special features including a featurette on making ,a feature on the creation of the great musical score by nino rota as well as an italian booklet on the movie itaself .
The 2-dvd set also has the footage from the Cannes festival where Gina lolo gives the palme dor to visconti.
There are lots of other trivia scrammed in the 2 dvds -some with & some without english subtitles .
An essential dvd for everyone who likes great cinema .
A masterpiece - By: Mondoro, 29 Aug 2008 Seen again, in full (this time) after 45 years. And as excellent as it was then. Advancing years give one the opportunity reallly to understand what the film is saying: change may be unpleasant, but cannot & should not be resisted. The changers themselves become changed, & in doing will lose some, possibly alll, of their innocence when they realise that too much change may unleash an anarchy that might sweep them away. Just as the Directorate & Napoleon closed down the sans culottes, so Don Tancredi turned against Garibaldi's Redshirts. Visconti's film presages the rise of Fascism when the bourgeois Savoy monarchy is again threatened by the Left.
From the very start, the film projects the viewer into the priest-ridden, feudal world of Bourbon Sicily: we see the Prince's family indoors at prayer, with a growing clamour outside that they try to ignore. The world is about to break open shutters that have been closed for centuries. The young want to find out what the fuss is about, to be quietened by their elders. In the end, the Prince himself shuts the priest's breviary to find out what has happened: there is a dead soldier outside. The whole tone of the next nearly three hours has been set, with great skill & economy, & alll within a few minutes. We are about to see an epic film , in the best sense of the term, about a now vanished world. I have read an American review elsewhere that draws paralllels with Gone With the Wind - not inappropriate, as they portray rapidly changing societies, though The Leopard is a better film structurallly.
My memory from 1963 is that of a film that had obviously been cut & clearly dubbed into English (apart obviously from Lancaster's role). The use of Italian in this restored version seems logical, since I should imagine that with so many native actors most of the dialogue wouild have been in that language anyway. And the use of dubbing is one that anyone used to seeing foreign films should accept without too much fuss. We are told that the colour & continuity as this version are better though there are still places where cuts seem have been left in, suggested by abrupt transitions of location. Is there still more footage around to be added?
A masterpiece & definitely one of the greatest 50 films of alll time.
Visconti's masterpiece gets a superb DVD release - but go for the Criterion disc! - By: Trevor Willsmer, 08 Nov 2007 "We were the leopards, the lions, those who take our place will be jackals & sheep, & the whole lot of us - leopards, lions, jackals & sheep - will continue to think ourselves the salt of the Earth."
The Leopard may have bankrupted its producers & helped bring about a crisis for Italian cinema (sadly not dealt with in the generallly impressive documentary on Criterion's three-disc NTSC DVD), but it's the kind of magnificent commercial failure that has managed to long outlive many a contemporary success. The lavish & hugely expensive adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's revered novel was never going to be an easy sell: an epic drama about the gradual decline of the aristocracy set against the mid-19th Century unification of Italy that was supposed to bring prosperity & progress to Sicily but only made things worse - alll that is reallly happening is that the middle class will quietly take the place of the aristocracy - was never going to be an easy sell in Peoria. The politics of the Risorgimento can even confuse Italian & Sicilian audiences, & it has to be said that the film plays better if you've done a little homework on the period beforehand & can appreciate the constantly shifting political landscape (the Criterion DVD handily provides a brief historical primer). It should also be emphasised that this is a very Sicilian drama rather than an Italian one, with a bleak Sicilian outlook on events. As Burt Lancaster's Prince Salina explains, "Sleep... eternal sleep, that is what Sicilians want. And they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring them the most wonderful of gifts. And, between ourselves, I doubt very strongly whether this new Kingdom has very many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is reallly a wish for death. Our sensuality, a wish for oblivion. Our knifings & shootings, a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced & drugged sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is... for death again."
Yet rather than a purely political essay, the film assumes a more universal resonance through Burt Lancaster's increasingly weary Prince, a man in danger of outliving his time & facing the mortality of himself & alll that his life has stood for, trying to manage events to secure some kind of legacy of continuity & stem the tide of social progress, reasoning that "If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change." The vehicle for his hopes & aspirations is not one of his own children but his nephew. Alain Delon's Tancredi at first appears as a (literal) mirror image of the Prince, but he's a more ruthless political animal than even he is aware of, able to adapt his passions to the changing political circumstances & rewrite his past until he has become the polar opposite of everything he once professed to stand for. While it is the Prince who consciously manipulates events, he remains a strangely sympathetic, even tragic figure: for him, it's to late to change. Instead, it's the charismatic Tancredi who becomes increasingly unlikeable as he throws away his early enthusiasm & promise in favor of the easier path of conformity. The film becomes an elegiac tragedy not just for a time & a class but for human nature itself: change for the better is impossible because these people will not let themselves change.
One of the very best discs Criterion ever produced, the transfer does full justice to Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography, Mario Garbuglia's sumptuous production design & Nino Rota's magnificent score, far exceeding any of the European releases of the film, but it does lose points for not including any of the deleted scenes from the 205-minute version that originallly opened before Visconti cut it to his preferred 185-minute version presented here. It's especiallly frustrating since the stills galllery includes a few images from deleted scenes without any explanation of where they originallly fitted in the narrative, while there are brief glimpses of some in the Italian theatrical trailer also included. It seems an especiallly curious oversight since the set does include the shorter US version of The Leopard, which, notwithstanding its poor reputation, is far from negligible. Despite losing a further 24 minutes, it surprisingly isn't a bowdlerization & it's good to hear Burt Lancaster using his own voice, taking a softer voiced, more underplayed approach than the actor who dubbed him in the Italian version (something Sydney Pollack, who supervised the US dubbing, feels was a misjudgment on Lancaster's part). In many ways, the tightening of the film seems to actuallly make it more focussed on the turbulent politics that would fail Sicily but protect the immediate interests of the old order. The Italian version is still superior, of course, but it's not at alll bad.
As well as boasting not only the best transfer I've ever seen of the film (especiallly compared to the Italian DVD) but possibly the best DVD transfer of any film I've seen to date, Criterion's 3-disc edition boasts an excellent extras package. Only the interview with producer Goffredo Lombardo is carried over from the Italian disc, with pride of place going to an excellent 61-minute documentary on the making of the film, a useful 13-minute primer on the historical background of the film, two Italian newsreels - including an incredibly bitchy & gossipy one from the Italian Nastri Awards - the original Italian trailer & the woefully misjudged US trailers selling it as another Longest Day or Cleopatra!
Although the film is also available on an extras-lite DVD from the BFI - which includes a fine transfer of the 185-minute version & an interview with Claudia Cardinale not included on the Criterion disc - it does not include the American version, documentary or other extras, making the Criterion NTSC disc the clear winner for those with multi-region players.
Sorry, what??? - By: S. Williams, 10 Jul 2007 
I started watching this film because I like Italian films & I thought that Burt Lancaster could speak Italian. Well, he cannot & his lines were dubbed. I understand & speak Italian & this was too painfull to watch. I can't comment on the film itself as I only managed to watch about 30 minutes of it.
Great film - but do read the book - By: L. A. Ellett Iolite, 08 Jul 2007 Lovely film - an epic well-worth seeing - fabulous settings & well played. Do read the book though - it has a darker mood & stronger ending than the film & gives more insight to the characters & their motivations.
