The Leopard

CRITERION COLLECTION

THE ITALIAN MARXIST aristocrat Luchino Visconti was a man of contradictory impulses. Emerging in the second wave of postwar neorealists, Visconti gradually shifted away from naturalist depictions of hardscrabble working-class life to luscious parades of upper-class elegance. While the turn away from fishermen toward princes may have upset some of his Marxist drinking buddies, it was good news for the rest of us, paving the way for one of his most effulgent works, an adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's beloved novel The Leopard.

Criterion's new three-DVD release includes the 183-minute original, the 161-minute American release and a bevy of other goodies. With its astoundingly lovely camera work and lighting, The Leopard is like a Breughel or David painting come to life, each frame splashed with action and color. Visconti uses the frame as a canvas, often utilizing the movement of characters and camera for visual effect. In one early battle scene, the parries and thrusts of royal and Garibaldian soldiers appears as a sea of orange and blue, surging first this way, then that. The Leopard is overstuffed, in the best possible way-its lushness of technique matched by the grandeur of costume, décor and setting.

The Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster, dubbed in Italian) is an aging local leader who tries to pick his way through the bramble of conflicting political interests in the era of Garibaldi. The prince places his hopes for continuing his legacy in his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) and sets him up with Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), nubile daughter of the nouveau-riche Don Calogero. Tancredi is eminently practical, his loyalties shifting from Garibaldi to his foe the king with no remorse, merely pragmatism. The Leopard is structured as a series of extended set pieces, each with its own rhythm and palette. The most famous is the closing ball scene, where the prince confronts his own mortality, and the tragedy of history's shifting sands. "We were the leopards, the lions," he tells a friend. "Those who will replace us will be jackals and hyenas."

Bringing an almost unbearable pictorial gloriousness to this moment of pathos, the colors of the ball scene are even richer than those of the film's bulk-inky blacks and blood reds. The lovers Tancredi and Angelica are posed immobile, joined together in stillness and contrasted with the lovely threading lines of the dance. The dancers swirl into the lovers' shot, surrounding them, ultimately swallowing them into their motion.

Visconti understands the tragedy of the vanishing past; he was, after all, an aristocrat in post-World War II Italy. Nonetheless, he takes the cataclysm of 19th-century Italy, and the prince's waning, and molds a film throbbing with glorious life.

SAUL AUSTERLITZ