Word: leopards
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...Leopard. "If we want things to stay as they are, things have to change." The Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) abruptly stops shaving and turns to stare in irritation at his favorite nephew (Alain Delon). Can Tancredi seriously mean to suggest that he, Salina of Sicily, should lick the boots of the new bourgeoisie? The prince is a proud man, as proud as the Leopard ramping on his princely scutcheon. But he is not a fool; he knows as well as Tancredi that in the spring of 1860 bourgeois boots are on the march from the Alps to Africa. Garibaldi...
...Leopard is remarkable at many levels. At the technical level, it is alternately gorgeous and goshawful. Some of the scenes are woolly and want shearing; viewers not recently briefed on Garibaldi may long for time and place clues. Some of the actors, their lips shaping large Italian vowels while the sound track spatters round little English sounds, look a bit like hippos catching peanuts. But the DeLuxe Color is tastefully mixed, and the camera is held by a master (Giuseppe Rotunno). What's more, the camera is pointed at something fiercely beautiful: Sicily. Yellow palazzi peep through dark-green...
...histrionic level, The Leopard presents two performances sensitively supervised by Visconti. Cardinale, who in the past has tended less to play than to display, is delectably vulgar and amusingly shrewd as the ragazza whose ways are almost as captivating as her means. And Lancaster, within definite limits, is superb. True, his Salina never quite becomes the figure of "leonine aspect, whose fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper." But as the scenes accumulate, the character compiles impressive volume and solidity, and by film's end the grand Sicilian stands in the mind...
...literary level, The Leopard offers a magnificent interplay of ironies. Sometimes the satire strikes at the right: in one stunning vignette, Director Visconti (who in private life is the Count of Modrone) executes a mortal lampoon of the old nobility. The Prince and his family, after a long and dusty journey, go straight to church, and there the camera finds them grey with dust and incense and fatigue, propped in their gloomy niches like medieval effigies, like spirits of the dead come back to haunt the living. Sometimes the laugh is on the Left: at the Ponteleone Ball, which fills...
...philosophic level, The Leopard speaks with wonderful depth and sweetness and humanity about life and death, about the ultimate mysterious sympathy of all existences. At the musical level, it moves every moment in a noble and profound andante. But at the deepest level, the picture is a poem, a mood embodied. The mood is the mood of creature sadness, the poem is a love song to all things that live, a swan song for all things that die. In an old man's elegy resounds the angelus of an age, a passing bell for all mortality...