Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 2 April

The Leopard / Il gattopardo (Visconti, 1963)

In a remarkable confluence of events, not long after we watched the legendary Burt Lancaster’s final big screen performance in Field of Dreams, I read this article in the New York Times headlined “Netflix Is Gobbling Up World Literature. What Could Go Wrong?”

While the article’s focus is on their adaptation of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, it mentions that the streamer also has a new mini-series adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Italian classic novel, The Leopard.

Tempting as it may be to choose six one-hour episodes of prestige television instead of three hours of one of the best films ever made, I thought it was time that I finally dug out the Criterion Blu-ray copy of Visconti’s 1963 film¹, a beautiful package that has been sitting in the ‘to be watched’ pile since it came out in 2010 (fifteen years being plenty of time for it to mature like fine Italian wine).

Lancaster plays Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, patriarch of a noble Sicilian family in the 1860s, as Garibaldi and his army are making their way across the country to create the nation of Italy. Salina’s headstrong but handsome nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) joins the red shirted rebels and gains a military reputation to rival his playboy one.

Salina is ageing (Lancaster was only 50 when The Leopard was filmed but he plays the role like ‘Moonlight’ Graham thirty years later) and he can see the world is modernising and families like his will be left behind. “We are leopards and lions,” he says to a bureaucrat who tries to persuade him to enter politics. “About to be replaced by jackals and hyenas.”

Tancredi falls for Angelica (luminous Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of a rich but gauche local landowner, and Salina gives the relationship his blessing, knowing that wealth is about to trump titles in Italy’s future.

The film looks like a hundred million bucks – dozens of extras in battle scenes and court balls, immaculate costuming, endless Sicilian vistas – and Visconti’s widescreen Techniscope and Technicolor composition is exceptional throughout. The way he uses door and window frames and the depth of these huge palatial rooms to focus us on the relationships between these humans while keeping them in their contexts is a masterclass.

One amusing glitch I noticed when watching the 2004 restoration on the giant Embassy Theatre screen was in the aftermath of the Battle for Palermo when one of the actors playing a dead soldier surreptitiously opens his eyes to check if they were still filming and then sheepishly closes them again. A goof in perpetuity, poor bugger.

I’m not sure whether I want to risk my memories of this classic – number 90 in the Sight & Sound top 100 films of all time – by chancing the Netflix series. Anyone seen it who can help? Let me know in the comments.

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Where to watch The Leopard