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By JACK EDGERS
This is a film about the end
of an age -- the age of the aristocrat. It also
happens to be a film made by a bone fide member of
the aristocracy: Luchino Visconti, the director,
comes from a long line of Italian aristocrats.
Visconti's films are all in one way or another
about men who are incompatible with the age in
which they live. In "The Leopard" Burt Lancaster
plays a refined prince who has outlived his time.
In his prime the prince was the very model of
health and vitality and he was the uncontested
authority to all who lived in his province; but
now he is starting to show his age and his own
decline coincides with the decline of his class
and an entire way of life. Being such a refined
figure the prince records his decline in minute
detail -- he seems to age right before our very
eyes.
It is obvious to the filmgoer that Visconti has no
real love for democracy nor the way of life that
comes with it. Elections are seen as crass
popularity contests and the parvenus who seek
office are seen as dim and uncultivated and
lacking in that fineness of spirit that was the
defining trait of the aristocracy. It is the
prince's misfortune to live to see all that he
values vanishing before his very eyes and that is
what happens in the famous hour-long ballroom
scene. The new class rising to power has no time
to cultivate that fineness of spirit and range of
interest required to understand men and their
needs and so govern them well. Instead the class
now rising to power is largely self-serving and
small-minded. Though they call themselves
democrats they are preoccupied with material gain
and status. However Visconti himself is proof that
the aristocratic spirit lives on even though the
aristocracy does not.
It is more than a bit likely that this portrait of
an ideal aristocrat is just that, an ideal. I've
heard this film described as Proustian. That is
true only in as much as the film is obsessed with
the passage of time. Proust, unlike Visconti, was
interested in a multi-faceted psychological expose
of the leisurely class. Proust loves his
aristocrats but he shows them for the vain
creatures that they are. He may have had something
of the romantic in him but that was balanced by a
keen social awareness (e.g. the Dreyfus affair)
that is nowhere to be found in Visconti's
single-minded meditation on one man's point of
view. This pluralism and balance is simply not to
be found in "The Leopard" or in any of Visconti's
other works. "The Leopard" may be Visconti's best
film but it is a myopic worldview we are getting
-- we feel trapped in the prince's (and by
extension the aristocratic) point of view. This is
at times a strength, and at other times a weakness
of the film.
In this three-disc Criterion version the film is
presented in widescreen anamorphic format, and
sports a brand new digital transfer of the
original 185-minute Italian release, supervised by
director of photography Ciueppe Rotunno. Both
image and sound have been restored and the
subtitles feature a new translation. Also included
is a restored version of the truncated 161-minute
American release, with English-language dialogue,
which includes Lancaster's actual voice (primarily
of interest to film students and collectors). And
there is an abundance of excellent DVD extras: An
audio commentary track by film scholar Peter
Cowie, a new hour-long documentary featuring
interviews primarily with Claudia Cardinale,
screenwriter Suso Ceccho D'Amico, cinematographer
Guiseppe Rotunno and Sydney Pollack, an interview
with producer Goffredo Lombardo, and a video
interview with professor Millicent Marcus of the
University of Pennsylvania on the history behind
"The Leopard," a stills gallery of rare
behind-the-scenes production photos, and the
original trailers and newsreels. |
