Ray Pride

(Il gattopardo) One of Luchino Visconti’s masterpieces, "The Leopard" (1963) restored to its three-hour-plus original Italian-language release version, is the kind of movie that cries out to be seen in its big-screen glory, rather than on the Criterion DVD, even if you have a screen draping an entire wall of your house (although the Sydney Pollack conversation on the disk is choice). "The Leopard," a magnificent epic about the mid-nineteenth century decline of the Italian aristocracy as nationalism began to rear its head, moves with magisterial grace. It also boasts one of Burt Lancaster’s greatest performances—aware, sardonic, bittersweet—as the patriarch who knows it’s all going away. (Plus his exclamation, "Marriage! A year of fire and forty years of ashes!") Italian-American directors such as Coppola, Scorsese and Cimino drank deep at the fount of "The Leopard" (as well another of his great movies, "Rocco and His Brothers")—note the stateliness of passages of "The Godfather," the dance scenes in "Heaven’s Gate"; the battle scenes that open "The Leopard" and "Gangs of New York," for instance. But the climactic ball scene, forty-five minutes or more, is the aristocracy-born Visconti’s great masterstroke: we know the characters, the stakes, the future, and each movement of the dance tells us more about mortality than most of us dare face. With Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, who has one of the great entrance scenes in all of cinema. Giuseppe Rotunno, in opulent interiors, or gorgeous, cruel landscapes, works marvels with light. 185m.

"The Leopard" plays at Siskel Sat, Thu.

(2008-07-08)

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