Word: viscontis
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...posthumous masterpiece, which is arguably the finest Italian novel of the century, Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, treats of these matters with an irony that seems half wisdom and half love, and in a style as rich and dark and subtle as old Marsala. In this film, Director Luchino Visconti (Rocco and His Brothers) preserves the author's tone as well as his tale, and in the course of three occasionally tedious hours develops a composite portrait of a time, a place and a man that finally emerges as a splendid set piece of cinema...
...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...
During the evenings at Gian Carlo Menotti's Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds, the goings-on were grand. Festive Roman audiences wildly applauded Luchino Visconti's lavish production of La Traviata. The Messiah was sung on the moonlit Piazza del Duomo that it might satisfy all the senses. When the festival's sixth season neared its close, Founder Menotti looked ahead anxiously. "Everyone," he sighed last week, "expects exceptional productions. It's really tough figuring out how I will keep it up during the next ten years...
...this decadence had to do with art in a Workers' and Peasants' Paradise. The ideological Neues Deutschland quoted Lenin and observed that the opera epitomized the downfall of Herod's degenerate court, and was therefore historically instructive. It was better, said Neues Deutschland, than Luchino Visconti's 1961 production at Spoleto (where John was "a proletarian upon whose class consciousness Salome comes to grief") or Wieland Wagner's West Berlin production last December, in which religiosity was emphasized. But connoisseurs of the basic Salome, who do not bother themselves with such matters, were content...
Silence & Ambivalence. The professional transition that prepared her to bat in the same boudoir with Mercouri and Moreau began with the part of the pretty young wife of the dissolute count in Luchino Visconti's segment of Boccaccio '70. But the role still had a touch of the old sentimentality in it, since Director Visconti had her cry while she was collecting money from her husband for granting him his marital consortium. Orson Welles has presumably buffed her up further as the nymphomaniac Leni in his still unreleased version of Franz Kafka's The Trial...