The Leopard

Luchino Visconti integrates a family history into a panoramic account of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century Italian unification movement. Revolution informs the most intimate relationships between the aristocrat Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster), his radical nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), and Angelica (the compelling Claudia Cardinale), whose marriage to Tancredi signals the symbolic merging of the classes. “Your eyes must say something that your mouth does not,” Cardinale recalled Visconti advising. “Even if you laugh, your eyes must not laugh.” “Perhaps no film captures the Proustian aesthetic more firmly,” Warren Sonbert wrote. “Visconti’s 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.”

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