Visconti's The Leopard integrates a family history into a panoramic account of the Italian Risorgimento; thus revolution informs the most intimate relationships between the aristocrat Fabrizio (“The Leopard", Burt Lancaster); his radical nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon); Don Calogero (Paolo Stoppa), a representative of the newly emerging middle class; and his daughter Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), whose marriage to Tancredi signals the symbolic merging of the classes.
“Perhaps no film captures the Proustian aesthetic more firmly than Visconti's The Leopard. His camera visually caresses the passage of time, the shifting nuances among the adrift and split characters and the recording of specifics transcending to the universal. During the hour-long party finale--which could go on for days in my book, so rapturously are the images delineated and the camera movements involved--the theater of public spectacle, of intrigues and assignations, slowly becomes transformed into the subtle pulse of private thoughts and impressions. When Tancredi (Delon) departs towards the beginning of the film, the diagonal crane-up by the camera perfectly mirrors both the youth's exuberance and his family's anxieties. The folly and grandeur of aristocratic dissolution, subsumed into the bourgeois ranks, never receives a pointed finger in this intricate investigation. No cut unless necessary and each gliding camera movement a reflection on the dramatic situation. CinemaScope here--as it does in the best films--allows freedom of choice, which not surprisingly is one of the major themes of this grand, classically constructed cinematic feast.” Warren Sonbert