Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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128 of 129 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Gold Standard, 4 Oct 2004
A film to measure others against. Burt Lancaster in his pomp as an ailing Italian aristocrat seeing the established order turning full circle around him, as Garibaldi's rebellion ushers in a new order. Beautifully shot, perfectly framed throughout - a deep, resonant and compelling story, with Director and cast at their peak. Richly layered, and full of universal themes of revolution, nobility, opportunism, generational change, youth and age, ideals bending against reality, loss and yearning, and one order giving way to another. Impossible here to reveal all of the layers, as Burt Lancaster's central prince navigates himself and his family into their new place in the new order, and how his principles and ideals fade as his nephew and his beautiful young wife become the suceeding generation, and where to do right gives way to pragmatism in a new world built upon opportunism, greed and political corruption. "The world has to change in order to stay the same". Artful without being 'arty', supremely beautiful and majestic without the squeaky-clean chocolate box sheen of modern historical drama. Highlights? - every single, super-crafted scene: the prince's family, covered in dust from their journey, sat in church like a line of statues; the eye contact between Claudia Cardinale and Burt Lancaster as she is embraced by her husband, his nephew... The prince knows that his time has been and gone, and Lancaster plays this to perfection in yet another of his great performances. An all time great piece of work deserving a place in any cine-lover's top few movies. And to top it all they have produced the DVD from the original print to preserve the work in pristine glory. I have revisited The Leopard on this DVD and have been blown away by it once more - it pulls you in deeper each time you go back to it.
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40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
5 stars are not enough, 16 Jan 2006
The Leopard is one of my top ten books of all time. Read and reread; I am incapable of describing the beauty of the language. I only realized recently that a film had been made of the book. I tried but I could not resist watching it. I have never known a film do a book justice the way this film has. The film has battle scenes that are only referred to in the book but that does not detract from the fact that the film has captured the haunting beauty of Scicily as described by Tomasi. It also describs, almost without words, the heavy sadness of the Prince who realizes his way of life is coming to an end.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Visconti's masterpiece gets a superb DVD release - but go for the Criterion disc!, 8 Nov 2007
"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 Leopard may have bankrupted its producers and helped bring about a crisis for Italian cinema (sadly not dealt with in the generally impressive documentary on Criterion's three-disc NTSC DVD), but it's the kind of magnificent commercial failure that has managed to long outlive many a contemporary success. The lavish and hugely expensive adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's revered novel was never going to be an easy sell: an epic drama about the gradual decline of the aristocracy set against the mid-19th Century unification of Italy that was supposed to bring prosperity and progress to Sicily but only made things worse - all that is really happening is that the middle class will quietly take the place of the aristocracy - was never going to be an easy sell in Peoria. The politics of the Risorgimento can even confuse Italian and Sicilian audiences, and it has to be said that the film plays better if you've done a little homework on the period beforehand and can appreciate the constantly shifting political landscape (the Criterion DVD handily provides a brief historical primer). It should also be emphasised that this is a very Sicilian drama rather than an Italian one, with a bleak Sicilian outlook on events. As Burt Lancaster's Prince Salina explains, "Sleep... 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. All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really a wish for death. Our sensuality, a wish for oblivion. Our knifings and shootings, a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is... for death again."
Yet rather than a purely political essay, the film assumes a more universal resonance through Burt Lancaster's increasingly weary Prince, a man in danger of outliving his time and facing the mortality of himself and all that his life has stood for, trying to manage events to secure some kind of legacy of continuity and stem the tide of social progress, reasoning that "If we want things to stay as they are, everything must change." The vehicle for his hopes and aspirations is not one of his own children but his nephew. Alain Delon's Tancredi at first appears as a (literal) mirror image of the Prince, but he's a more ruthless political animal than even he is aware of, able to adapt his passions to the changing political circumstances and rewrite his past until he has become the polar opposite of everything he once professed to stand for. While it is the Prince who consciously manipulates events, he remains a strangely sympathetic, even tragic figure: for him, it's to late to change. Instead, it's the charismatic Tancredi who becomes increasingly unlikeable as he throws away his early enthusiasm and promise in favor of the easier path of conformity. The film becomes an elegiac tragedy not just for a time and a class but for human nature itself: change for the better is impossible because these people will not let themselves change.
One of the very best discs Criterion ever produced, the transfer does full justice to Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography, Mario Garbuglia's sumptuous production design and Nino Rota's magnificent score, far exceeding any of the European releases of the film, but it does lose points for not including any of the deleted scenes from the 205-minute version that originally opened before Visconti cut it to his preferred 185-minute version presented here. It's especially frustrating since the stills gallery includes a few images from deleted scenes without any explanation of where they originally fitted in the narrative, while there are brief glimpses of some in the Italian theatrical trailer also included. It seems an especially curious oversight since the set does include the shorter US version of The Leopard, which, notwithstanding its poor reputation, is far from negligible. Despite losing a further 24 minutes, it surprisingly isn't a bowdlerization and it's good to hear Burt Lancaster using his own voice, taking a softer voiced, more underplayed approach than the actor who dubbed him in the Italian version (something Sydney Pollack, who supervised the US dubbing, feels was a misjudgment on Lancaster's part). In many ways, the tightening of the film seems to actually make it more focussed on the turbulent politics that would fail Sicily but protect the immediate interests of the old order. The Italian version is still superior, of course, but it's not at all bad.
As well as boasting not only the best transfer I've ever seen of the film (especially compared to the Italian DVD) but possibly the best DVD transfer of any film I've seen to date, Criterion's 3-disc edition boasts an excellent extras package. Only the interview with producer Goffredo Lombardo is carried over from the Italian disc, with pride of place going to an excellent 61-minute documentary on the making of the film, a useful 13-minute primer on the historical background of the film, two Italian newsreels - including an incredibly bitchy and gossipy one from the Italian Nastri Awards - the original Italian trailer and the woefully misjudged US trailers selling it as another Longest Day or Cleopatra!
Although the film is also available on an extras-lite DVD from the BFI - which includes a fine transfer of the 185-minute version and an interview with Claudia Cardinale not included on the Criterion disc - it does not include the American version, documentary or other extras, making the Criterion NTSC disc the clear winner for those with multi-region players.
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