Product description

The Leopard [1963]

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Average customer rating: 4.5

Binding : DVD
EAN : 5035673005958
Label : Bfi Video
Manufacturer : Bfi Video
Publisher : Bfi Video
Release date : 2004-09-27
Title : The Leopard [1963]
Actor : Array
Audience rating : Parental Guidance
Format : Array
Languages : Array
Number of items : 1
Original release date : 1963-01-01
Region code : 2
Running time : 178
Studio : Bfi Video
Theatrical releaseDate : 1963-07-15
Number of discs : 1

Customer reviews

review by: Markus Gossas date: 2008-12-20 rating:

Il Gattopardo
Well, The Leopard, made by Visconti in 1963, is not exactly a film for you if you crave action or drama with fast paced and clear cut narrative. Set in Sicily in the 1860s it's about the old nobility and society giving way to the middle class and a new political order. And in the middle of this we follow Don Fabricio, the Prince of Salina (superbly characterised by Burt Lancaster), as he both tries to handle the change and give in to it. He's intelligent enough to see that it is pointless to fight, and cynical enough to realize that after all there won't be much change.

Visconti is not afraid to let the camera rest on a scene, or stay with the characters a little longer than usual, taking in all the little details. And there are lots of details: the settings are incredibly well made with costumes and buildings and so on, and as a viewer I felt very much like "being there". But also details in the acting, like the melancholic or nostalgic expressions of Don Fabricio as he sees his world change, contrasted with his young nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) who seems to be constantly brimming over with the joy of being alive in the new era.

Also, Visconti does not have to cram in too much action or drama into this - this is more subtle and, as I said, maybe not for the action lover. Or maybe, as an alternative, a sort of "slow cinema"? The film is 178 mins long but the plot can be easily summarised. But The Leopard is more than just a plot with intrigues and a logical end, it's a film where characters and milieus have an impact, and with a subtle handling of the theme of social change.

The DVD from Bfi has a nice and stable transfer with rich colors and details (I watched it on a projector). Though the Criterion edition is supposed to be sharper, I think this is more than adequate, especially considering the more reasonable price. Also it contains a commentary track which I haven't listened to yet, but I've been recommended to and I will because this is a film that has to be seen again.

review by: usman khawaja date: 2008-09-17 rating:

visconti's wisest vision of the western culture
If i had to chose one movie as representing the greatest western movie of all times this will definitely be my unanimous choice .
it discusses state,religion and the ordinary people in the guise of the Garribaldi rebellion in Sicily but is a very true account of the human existence since beginning of time.
The essence of the theme is that something has to change for nothing to change in entirety ,in this case it is the aristrocratic order being disguised as a political regime by the italian intervention .
Burt Lancaster is the wise prince who represents the aristocracy and the state with Alain Delon as his impoverished nephew who is obliged to marry the daughter of an upstart politician who represents the nouveau rich new order.
Claudia Cardinale is magical as the daughter who realises she is only a pawn in the game but has to convince her self with lies about being in true love with Delon ,their relationship is kept deliberately low-key and mysterious and you keep wondering if they are in love or just in a charade.
The celebrated waltz and dinner in the Palermo palace of a sicilian princess is the focal point where all the socio-political issues and the class differences are beautifully exploited by visconti in the most memorable sequence lasting almost 30 minutes -the ballroom sequence is filmed as an epic which is only equalled by the scene from russian version of war and peace .
The individual waltz between burt and claudia is magnificently filmed and can be seen as many times as you want like all great art.
The same is true for the lavish production and magnificent visuals as well as the perfect musical score .
The locales include the magical sicilian vistas with it's ancient hills ,vineyards and mansions and the decor looks immaculate in every detail.
Ultimately visconti suceeds in making that perfect masterpiece where style and content amalgamate in unison to create a unique and great piece of art.
The movie neither preaches nor corrects it's flawed characters who are all imperfect human beings but just observes humanity as it streams past in it's everyday struggle for existence in it's imperfection but inevitable course ,it is not concerned with good or evil but rather with the ground reality of humanity and the vision becomes universal in it's wisdom .
A movie for all times and ages with burt lancaster giving his best performance ever and the same is true about Alain delon too,as for claudia she was born to play the sicilian beauty who is most desired and yet a very lonely woman at heart .
The dvd has no english soundtrack and it is best seen with english subtitles as it is meant to be and there are numerous special features including a featurette on making ,a feature on the creation of the great musical score by nino rota as well as an italian booklet on the movie itaself .
The 2-dvd set also has the footage from the Cannes festival where Gina lolo gives the palme dor to visconti.
There are lots of other trivia scrammed in the 2 dvds -some with and some without english subtitles .
An essential dvd for everyone who likes great cinema .

review by: date: 2008-08-29 rating:

A masterpiece
Seen again, in full (this time) after 45 years. And as excellent as it was then. Advancing years give one the opportunity really to understand what the film is saying: change may be unpleasant, but cannot and should not be resisted. The changers themselves become changed, and in doing will lose some, possibly all, of their innocence when they realise that too much change may unleash an anarchy that might sweep them away. Just as the Directorate and Napoleon closed down the sans culottes, so Don Tancredi turned against Garibaldi's Redshirts. Visconti's film presages the rise of Fascism when the bourgeois Savoy monarchy is again threatened by the Left.

From the very start, the film projects the viewer into the priest-ridden, feudal world of Bourbon Sicily: we see the Prince's family indoors at prayer, with a growing clamour outside that they try to ignore. The world is about to break open shutters that have been closed for centuries. The young want to find out what the fuss is about, to be quietened by their elders. In the end, the Prince himself shuts the priest's breviary to find out what has happened: there is a dead soldier outside. The whole tone of the next nearly three hours has been set, with great skill and economy, and all within a few minutes. We are about to see an epic film , in the best sense of the term, about a now vanished world. I have read an American review elsewhere that draws parallels with Gone With the Wind - not inappropriate, as they portray rapidly changing societies, though The Leopard is a better film structurally.

My memory from 1963 is that of a film that had obviously been cut and clearly dubbed into English (apart obviously from Lancaster's role). The use of Italian in this restored version seems logical, since I should imagine that with so many native actors most of the dialogue wouild have been in that language anyway. And the use of dubbing is one that anyone used to seeing foreign films should accept without too much fuss. We are told that the colour and continuity as this version are better though there are still places where cuts seem have been left in, suggested by abrupt transitions of location. Is there still more footage around to be added?

A masterpiece and definitely one of the greatest 50 films of all time.

review by: date: 2007-11-08 rating:

Visconti's masterpiece gets a superb DVD release - but go for the Criterion disc!
"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.

review by: suzysantos1969 date: 2007-07-10 rating:

Sorry, what???
I started watching this film because I like Italian films and I thought that Burt Lancaster could speak Italian. Well, he cannot and his lines were dubbed. I understand and speak Italian and this was too painfull to watch. I can't comment on the film itself as I only managed to watch about 30 minutes of it.

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