Beyond the Beach

REAL SUMMER MOVIES give us the season. Back in the summer of 1983, Luchino Visconti's The Leopard was revived for its 20th anniversary-the first time the film had been shown to Americans in anything like its original version. The Leopard's very first U.S. release was a truncated edit that damaged Visconti's stately, operatic vision. Seeing it whole was like witnessing a sunrise. Most of The Leopard's story takes place in the southern mountain region during summer. It's about a Sicilian nobleman (Burt Lancaster as Don Frabrizio, Prince of Salina) witnessing Italy's 1860 political revolution. Big Yankee Burt may be top-billed (in a performance of quiet, powerful, understated emotion), but summer is the film's star.

Seen now in Criterion's deluxe three-disc DVD, The Leopard features Giuseppe Rotunno's magnificent rendering of Mediterranean light. From the opening shots of the prince's palazzo that move into the interior where the sun streams in as the wind blows the curtains into the rooms, this is a stunning creation of time and place. When most viewers think of summer in the movies, they think of beach bashes. Visconti uses the heat and sunlight to make history vivid, to depict a lived experience. This achievement isn't just the provenance of such animistic filmmakers as Jan Troell (The New Land, Zandy's Bride and Hamsun) or Terrence Malick (Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line). Visconti situates his dramas in the palpable world, just as David Lean did. The point is to enhance cinematic storytelling with a sensory effect that is impossible in novels but that outdoes the power of even Impressionistic music and painting.

The power of The Leopard's story comes from conveying Italy's historical destiny along with the phenomenon of the world. Dealing with the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy from its 19th-century partitioning, Visconti compresses events that took place over a two-year period. It is significant that he chose to situate most of the scenes during the summer months as a way to show the world's perpetual vitality. The sun is always shining, the trees and flowers bloom, dust in the road bakes and shines-even the sky in the awesome, widescreen landscapes seems suffused with light. It would have been banal to portray the prince's twilight in winter months; this way, the brightness of the story makes his fate bittersweet. Melancholy about seeing the passing of his own aristocratic ruling class and its inevitable commingling with the bourgeoisie (epitomized in the great ball sequence that unites the prince's nephew Alain Delon with the nouveau riche Claudia Cardinale), the prince resigns himself to the fact that life goes on. He knows there'll be a sunrise, a summer he won't see, and that great ambivalence is the essence of his observation about the season: "This magic potion poured out for us every day."

Beach-party movies are okay, but they have a limited appreciation of what summer-and life-means. Visconti's epic offers diurnal images that visualize spiritual grace. When you seriously look at The Leopard, it is a great sensual event. Scene after scene (chambers depicting class decline, the frustrated attraction of age and youth, public events that show the imprisonment of a class to its rituals) has a vividness like nothing you've ever seen, except in other Visconti movies. Visconti doesn't so much sway the viewer to rhythms, as immerse you in visceral experience. It's an overwhelming work that demands concentration. Is it Visconti's best? At his level of peak artistry, the question cannot be answered. Back in '83, the film's rerelease didn't really compete with the summer blockbuster Return of the Jedi; that was for kids who'd rather see a spaceship than feel the sun on their faces. The Leopard was-and with the new DVD that includes both the original Italian and English-dubbed versions, still is-a summer release of substance.

SUMMER ABUNDANCE is also featured in Franco Zeffirelli's 1973 Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a biography of St. Francis of Assisi made in the full flush of flower-power agape and following the box-office smash of Zeffirelli's teen-romance version of Romeo and Juliet (a counter-culture interpretation that included a nude love scene). St. Francis was a perfect subject for cinema's naturalistic capacity, especially for a director like Zeffirelli who placed particular attention on detail and spectacle.

Zeffirelli began his film career as an assistant to Visconti on the masterpieces La Terra Trema, Bellissima and Senso. Visconti taught him to be an esthete but also to appreciate humanity and land. Though lightweight by comparison, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, now available on DVD, has the virtue of Zeffirelli's eye for sumptuousness; here it is applied to the purpose of truth in nature. The film's emphasis on summertime flora is outstanding enough to inspire renewed seasonal awareness. Applying this vision to the youthful search for meaning (photogenic Graham Faulkner as St. Francis) causes Brother Sun, Sister Moon to raise the stakes of "Summer Lovin'" heavenward.

BIG WEDNESDAY is more typical of Hollywood summer fare, but this surfer epic par excellence still impresses with its 70s ethos of social self-examination. The 1978 film stars Gary Busey, Jan-Michael Vincent and William Katt as California youths making beachside memories. It's another movie-brat movie that shows the clear influence of John Ford's The Searchers. The beach, the Pacific Ocean and the summery aura are used to mythologize a national memory. Like a Visconti film, it makes serious use of a long-form narrative, converting action set-pieces into a three-fold coming-of-age story. Big Wednesday moves with a certain pop grandeur from the guys' carousing in the 60s to their relatively sober 70s adulthood. Burt Lancaster would have been at home here, too.

Surfer movies are often considered hack work, but director-writer John Milius elevates this to rhapsodic autobiography. He evokes West Coast surfing culture knowingly and photographs the hugest waves (referred to in the title) in such a way that he transmits personal awe. (Kathryn Bigelow paid tribute to Milius' nature adoration and bitchin' Americana with the surfing cult in Point Break.)

Like a good youth summer movie should, Big Wednesday commemorates the experience of both the warmest season and the season of youth. Warner's complete DVD version (Milius had cut it down for cable tv in the 80s) preserves one of the great dialogue caprices in Hollywood history, the one in which Jan-Michael Vincent apologizes for his teenage folly, ending with the line, "Mrs. Barlow, I swear I didn't pee in your steam iron."