Luchino Visconti's (1906-1976)

Il Gattopardo (1963) The Leopard

from the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896-1957)

Starring

Burt Lancaster ... Don Fabrizio Cordera, Prince of Salina

Alain Delon ... Prince Tancredi Falconeri, his nephew

Claudia Cardinale ... Angelica Sedara, later wife to Tancredi

Paolo Stoppa ... Don Calogero Sedara, mayor of Donnafugata, her father

Rina Morelli ... Princess Maria Stella Salina, wife of Don Fabrizio

Romolo Valli ... Father Pirrone, secretary and chaplain to Don Fabrizio

Mario Girotti ... Count Cavriaghi, friend and comrade of Tancredi, suitor to Concetta

Pierre Clémenti ... Francesco Paolo, son of Don Fabrizio

Lucilla Morlacchi ... Concetta, daughter of Don Fabrizio

Giuliano Gemma ... Garibaldini General

Ida Galli ... Carolina, daughter of Don Fabrizio

Ottavia Piccolo ... Caterina, daughter of Don Fabrizio

Carlo Valenzano ... Paolo, son of Don Fabrizio

Brook Fuller ... Little Prince, son of Don Fabrizio

Anna Maria Bottini ... Mademoiselle Dombreuil, the Governess

Lola Braccini ... Donna Margherita

Marino Masé ... Tutor to Don Fabrizio's children

Howard Nelson Rubien ... Don Diego

Tina Lattanzi

Marcella Rovena

Rina De Liguoro ... Princess of Presicce

Valerio Ruggeri

Giovanni Melisenda ... Don Onofrio Rotolo, caretaker of the Salina palazzo in Donnafugata

Giancarlo Lolli

Vittorio Duse

Vanni Materassi

Giuseppe Stagnitti

Carmelo Artale

Olimpia Cavalli ... Mariannina

Anna Maria Surdo

Halina Zalewska

Winni Riva

Stelvio Rosi

Carlo Palmucci

Dante Posani

Rosolino Bua

Ivo Garrani ... Colonel Pallavicino, the victor of Aspromonte

Leslie French ... Cavalier Chevally, a visitor from Turin, modeled after Count Cavour, the Prime Minister, first of Savoy, and afterward of united Italy

Serge Reggiani ... Don Francisco Ciccio Tumeo, organist of the church of Donnafugata, hunting companion of Don Fabrizio

Screenplay by Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, Massimo Franciosa, and the director Luchino Visconti, from the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Original Music by Nino Rota. The score also features a previously unpublished waltz by Giuseppi Verdi. Rota also scored King Vidor's War and Peace, many films for Federico Fellini, including La Strada and La Dolce Vita, and The Godfather.

Photographed in Technicolor and Super Technirama 70 by Giuseppe Rotunno

Edited by Mario Serandrei

Production Design by Mario Garbuglia

Set Decoration by Laudomia Hercolani and Giorgio Pes

Costumes Designed by Piero Tosi

Produced for Titanus by Goffredo Lombardo, Executive Producer Pietro Notarianni

Directed by Luchino Visconti

Il Gattopardo is an epic historical drama of the Italian Risorgimento. Although critical response was initially favorable, and the film won the prestigious Palme d'Or at Cannes, critical and popular appreciation has only grown, not in part because the English language version was both drastically edited as well as cropped for CinemaScope instead of being presented in its original and more expansive 70mm format. This is a sumptuous and penetrating film, made with understated pride and passion by Italians, and at times it can make Gone with the Wind seem small and superficial. Tomasi di Lampedusa's rather short novel captures all the scope and breadth of the greatest historical novels, such as War and Peace.

"We were the leopards, the lions, those who take our place will be jackals and sheep,

and the whole lot of us - leopards, lions, jackals and sheep - will

continue to think ourselves the salt of the earth."

The film opens with the Salina household praying the rosary in their country palazzo outside Palermo. They are interrupted by the discovery of a dead soldier in the garden and the arrival of news that Giuseppe Garibaldi has landed in Sicily with an army of 1000 revolutionaries, mostly students from Turin. Italy in 1860 is divided into four separate polities: Savoy, the Piedmont, and Sardinia are ruled from Turin by King Victor Emmanuel, whose Prime Minister Count Camillo Cavour promotes unification under the king; the rest of northern Italy is a dependency of the Austrian emperor; the Papal States are governed by a French army of occupation; and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is governed from Naples by the young Bourbon King Francis.

"If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."

Don Fabrizio the Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) sends his oldest son to occupy the family palazzo in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, as his dashing nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) joins the Garabaldini. The Battle of Palermo, though not in the novel, is depicted on screen. Tancredi is wounded and promoted, and the Bourbon mayor is lynched by angry women after he has their men executed.

Tancredi enables the Salinas to pass through Garabaldini roadblocks to reach their palazzo in the village of Donnafugata. They are greeted by the new Garabaldini mayor, Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa) who introduces his gorgeous daughter Angelica (Claudia Cardinale). Tancredi falls in love with her, and eventually they marry, though it had always been assumed he would marry Concetta (Lucilla Morlacchi), Don Fabrizio's oldest daughter. The Prince votes for unification in a corrupt, fraudulent, and rigged plebiscite, and starts to wonder about his nephew's integrity when he finds Tancredi has abandoned Garibaldi's revolutionaries to join Victor Emmanuel's regular army.

The Chevallier Chevally, a fictional character patterned after the Piedmontese Prime Minister Count Cavour, visits Donafugata to ask the Prince to accept an appointment in the newly formed Italian Senate. Don Fabrizio declines and suggests Angelica's father Don Calogero. After Tancredi and Angelica marry, Angelica is presented to noble society at a spectacular ball hosted by the Princess of Presicce in Palermo. Attending this ball is the Princess Lampedeusa, the author's grandmother.

"Sleep, my dear Chevalley, eternal sleep, that is what Sicilians want. And they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring them the most wonderful of gifts. And, between ourselves, I doubt very strongly whether this new Kingdom has very many gifts for us in its luggage."

A guest at the ball is the obnoxious Colonel Pallavicino (Ivo Garrani), who recently defeated Garabaldi. Garabaldi remains everyone's hero for unifying Italy under Victor Emmanuel, but battled the regular army rather than disband his revolutionaries. He was wounded at Aspromonte, and Pallavicino has ordered the execution of deserters from the regular army who joined Garibaldi.

The Prince has a series of premonitions of death at the ball, and Tancredi scandalizes Concetta and Angelica by approving the executions. Tancredi seems to be evolving into a proto Fascist. Walking home from the ball, the Prince kneels as the sacrament is brought to a dying person.

"They never want to improve. They think themselves perfect.

Their vanity is greater than their misery."

The novel included two further chapters, one which detailed the Prince's death in old age, and the last the dissolution of Tancredi and the Prince's children. As attractive as they were in their youth, the marriage of Angelica and Tancredi was destined to be completely loveless.

Director Luchino Visconti was the Duke of Modrone, and Il Gattopardo is universally hailed as his masterpiece. Burt Lancaster was introduced to as many Italian nobles as time permitted to enable him to portray the Leopard, but his constant model on the set was the decorous and courtly Visconti. Virtually every gesture and mannerism of the Prince of Salina is Lancaster's imitation of the director. Producer Lombardo insisted on Lancaster because of his international appeal, but Visconti was extremely displeased with this choice, feeling no American actor could do the part justice. Lancaster won him over completely. The climactic ball featured a large number of actors, and nobles working gratis -- nobless obilige.

Il Gattopardo was filmed magnificently in Technicolor's 70mm widescreen process, Super Technirama 70, also used for Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959), King Vidor's Solomon and Sheeba (1959 United Artists), Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960 Universal), Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961 Allied Artists), Nicholas Ray's 55 Days at Peking (1963 Allied Artists, Ray's last film), and Cy Endfield's Zulu (1964 Paramount).

As with the VistaVison process it derived from, the negative was exposed onto ordinary 35mm film, but the film was pulled sideways across a frame 8 sprocket holes wide, dubbed "Lazy 8." The sideways 35mm offered 2.66 times the surface area of conventional 35mm photography, as compared with only 2.00 times with 70mm film. The original negative was thus significantly larger than in any other 70mm process.

Technirama went beyond VistaVision adding 1.50x anamorphic compression with a Delrama prism manufactured by Delft Optical in the Netherlands. Ordinary Technirama shared the 2.35:1 CinemaScope aspect ratio, but with a lower degree of anamorphic compression compared with CinemaScope's 2.00x, Technirama offered less optical distortion, greater clarity, finer photographic grain, and better color saturation due to the larger negative.

Finally, Super Technirama 70 printed the positive image onto non-anamorphic 70mm film with Panavision lenses. The non-anamorphic 70mm print had the same 2.20:1 aspect ratio of the other 70mm processes, Todd-AO, Dimension 150, and Super Panavision 70. Reducing the original 2.35:1 Technirama image for 2.20:1 70mm meant cutting off the extreme right and left part of the frame, partly compromising the advantage of the large original negative. 20th Century Fox released the English language version in the U.S. with 2.35:1 CinemaScope prints by DeLuxe. If they had worked from the original lazy eight negative, they could have restored the extreme right and left of the frame lost in printing down to 70mm, but The Leopard was never designed to be seen that way. Instead, Fox converted the 70mm prints to anamorphic 35mm. This entailed cutting off the top and bottom of each frame, but the real problem with the American version is that it was extensively edited, removing almost 30 minutes of running time. The Technicolor master print is of exceedingly high quality, but is marred by a couple of flies. Burt Lancaster dubbed his own voice in the English version, but not in the definitive Italian version.