Serendipitously, fifteen letters so it fits on a Scrabble board, Apollo Magazine carried an article (by David Weir) about The Leopard yesterday.
He writes that of all Visconti’s films The Leopard best captures the range of his artistry. The film is operatic and carries literary weight “but less widely recognised is the way in which Visconti drew on 19th-century painting for his meticulous mise en scène – not only to express the film’s ideas, but also to achieve a particular kind of authenticity”.
Early in the film Visconti depicts the Battle of Palermo (1860) in which Garibaldi and his Redshirts (Camicie Rosse) capture the city from its Neapolitan Bourbon rulers – a stunning against-the-odds victory relying on popular support within the city.
A more obvious allusion occurs when Prince Salina’s household move from Palermo to Donnafugata, his summer estate in the hills. On the journey they stop for a picnic.
At the end of the film there is a magnificent but long ballroom scene; too long in my opinion.
Visconti has a meticulous eye for detail and his fancies might not be given free rein today when producers are more cost conscious. In the opening scene he wants Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster) to kneel on a handkerchief when the household are praying. He sends him to Wardrobe to find one and Lancaster finds it “fully stocked with a fine array of princely regalia – twenty custom made shirts, fifteen pairs of handwoven socks, thirty cravats and more than a dozen handerchiefs”, none of which appear on camera. Visconti wants the actor to experience the role not just play it.
“Burt Lancaster immersed himself in the part of the Prince, reading and re-reading the Lampedusa novel; researching the history of the Risorgimento; spending time with Lampedusa’s widow and his adopted son Giocchino Lanza Tomasi (who also advised Visconti); and cultivating relationships with Sicilian nobility in order to better understand how to play an old-world aristocrat who knows his class is in decline. He soon realised, however, that the model for the character he was asked to play was right in front of him – Visconti.” (The Leopard, by David Weir)
The Netflix Leopard is brilliant. Worth watching for its marvellous photography ,acting and storytelling.
I was told by my relative Filippo Rospigliosi, whose mother was a Visconti, that Luchino told him that his inspiration for the journey scene from Palermo to the countryside was based on what his grandmother had told him about her childhood. But what a film. which I am seeing again later this month.