Cinema: A Prince Among Men

The 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 is at the gates of Palermo, the Bourbons will soon abandon Naples, most of Italy within a year will be unified under the House of Savoy. He knows that boots must be licked, or boots will trample his beloved roses and his noble name into the burning yellow dust of Sicily. He knows—but can a Prince of Salina swallow his pride to save his estates? Can a Leopard change his spots to save his skin?

In his 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.

“We live in a changing reality,” the Prince muses as Tancredi runs gallantly off to join the rebels, “to which we adapt like seaweed bending under the pressure of water.” As gracefully as he can, the Prince bends with the tide of the times. When the rebels win and Tancredi comes home a hero, the Prince does not refuse a ray or two of reflected glory. Indeed, when Tancredi falls in love with the daughter (Claudia Cardinale) of a rich upstart, the Prince actively supports his suit—even though he knows his own daughter is in love with the boy. “Tancredi will have a brilliant career,” he reasons, “and my daughter is too shy for public life. Besides, the boy needs money.”

At a grand ball in Palermo, Tancredi’s fiancée is introduced to Sicilian society. As the Prince waltzes with her, he smiles wistfully. He has done his duty, he has built a bridge to the future. His children will cross it, he will not. He will stay in the past, bound there by affection, by habit, by sloth, by congenital dislike of tomorrow, by the siren lure of a torrid, torpid land that makes its children long “voluptuously for death.” As the film ends he kneels and, yearning upward to the morning star, prays passionately for death: “O faithful star! When will you give me an appointment less ephemeral than this!”

The 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 foliage like colossal lemons; vast rococo ball rooms drown the mind in a delirium of pink cherubs and gilt-plaster scrolls; and out of the dark-blue sea the big Sicilian mountains leap like orange flames.

At the 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 as a man whose like men shall not look upon again: one of culture’s noblemen, a very imperfect gentle knight.

At the 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 the final hour of the film with one of the most brilliant episodes of sustained social exposition ever seen on a screen, Visconti (who in private life is a leftist) displays the leaders of the Risorgimento as a coterie of cynical opportunists climbing merrily to eminence on the corpses of their comrades. After dancing all night, they swagger off to execute a handful of honest and idealistic men: the last of the Garibaldini.

At the 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.