Word: visconti
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...LEOPARD. Burt Lancaster gives the finest performance of his career in Luchino Visconti's noble, ironic and richly mournful lament for the death of feudalism in Sicily...
...LEOPARD. Burt Lancaster gives the finest performance of his career in one of the year's finest films: Luchino Visconti's noble, ironic and richly mournful lament for the death of feudalism in Sicily...
Despite its sumptuous sets, the scene falls flat because it is peopled with characatures. The giggling girls, the pompous general, and the swooning old ladies could be taken from any number of films. And Visconti does not merely present them; he dwells on them. Moreover, he takes two of Lampedusa's most vivid characters and drams them of life. Don Calegro, the uneducated but shrewd mayor, becomes a drunken buffoon. Tancredi, the Prince's favorite, undergoes a rather obvious transition from youthful revolutionary to foppish conservative as the middle class reaction to change sets...
...aristocrats pander to the now-powerful bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie pander to the well-bred aristocrats. At the end, as he waits for death, the bewhiskered leopard evokes pathos for the passing of real nobility. But even then, it is only the old story of aristocratic decline, for Visconti has ignored a most central aspect of the novel by observing the Prince only from the outside...
...Fabrizio, in fact, makes only one speech of any length. He turns down a senatorial post in the new regime with the words: "sleep, sleep, sleep, that is what Sicilians want...a hankering for voluptuous immobility." The failure of Visconti's often beautiful and voluptuous Leopard is that it encourages just such immobility in the viewer...