THE LEOPARD aka IL GATTOPARDO

Year: 1963
UK: BFI (Collections)
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Paolo Stoppa, Rina Morelli, Romolo Valli, Mario Girotti, Pierre Clementi, Lucilla Morlacchi, Giuliano Gemma, Ida Galli, Ottavia Piccolo, Carlo Valenziano, Brock Fuller, Anna Maria Bottini, Lola Braccini, Marino Mase, Howard Nelson Rubien, Tina Lattanzi, Marcella Rovena, Rina De Liguoro, Valerio Ruggeri, Giovanni Melisenda, Giancarlo Lolli, Franco Gula, Vittorio Duse, Vanni Materassi, Giuseppe Stagnitti, Carmelo Artale, Anna Maria Surdo, Halina Zalewska, Winni Riva, Stelvio Rosi, Carlo Palmucci, Dante Posani, Rosolino Bua, Ivo Garrani, Leslie French, Serge Reggiani, Marie Bell, Olimpia Cavalli, Sandra Christolini, Paola Piscini, Amalia Troiani
Director: Luchino Visconti
Countries: Italy / France
UK: 188 mins
UK Certificate: PG contains some mild language, sex references and war violence
UK Release Date: 27 August 2010 (Limited Re-release)
UK Release Date: 2 May 2003

Synopsis

Taken from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's best-selling novel, and shot (by Giuseppe Rotunno) in Technicolor and Technirama, Visconti's THE LEOPARD must surely rate as one of the most sumptuously beautiful films ever made.

It tells the story of an aristocratic Sicilian family threatened by the political upheavals of the Risorgimento. Burt Lancaster plays the Prince of Salina whose beloved nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) goes off to fight with Garibaldi's revolutionary 'Thousand' and on his return falls in love with the beautiful daughter of an up-and-coming plebeian snob.

The Prince, however, realises that his family's only hope of survival lies in going with the tide. Things change but the Salina household is not swept away.

To Lampedusa's elegiac story Visconti adds an extra layer of historical analysis, similar to that in his earlier SENSO (1954), suggesting that a ruling class that knows how to compromise will defeat attempts to overthrow it.