The Leopard By Luchino Viscont
The Leopard seems an unlikely choice for socialists a story set in 19th century Sicily about an aristocratic prince, (whose crest is a leopard) based on a novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, himself a down at heel aristocrat with no left wing sympathies. Yet the filmmade in 1963 by the Italian Marxist director Luchino Visconti is saturated with class politics and revolution.
The film begins against the background of Italian unification in 1860, with the landing of the nationalist hero Garibaldi in Sicily and the uprising which leads to the end of the old monarchy. The movement was about creating a modern Italy and had the support of the masses. But there were divisions between those who wanted social change and those who simply wanted a change of government. Far from the uprising destroying the old order, over the next months the Italian aristocracy made its peace with the rising bourgeoisie.
The Leopard asks the question why did this revolution fail? This was not an abstract discussion. The film was made less than 20 years after the end of the Second World War, when Italian fascism and the German occupiers were defeated in large part by the armed resistance. In the southern city of Naples the people rose up to drive out the Germans in 1943. In 1963 many Italians would have identified with the film's scenes of street fighting in Palermo, where rebels are shot by monarchist troops.
The opening shots of Sicilian heat and dust cut to the prince and his family praying in their villa, fully clad in dark Victorian clothes. The peaceful religious scene is disturbed by news that Garibaldi has landed. The prince's nephew Tancredi announces that he will fight for Garibaldi to support the Piedmontese king against the king of Naples. It is better to support any monarchy than risk a republic: `If we want everything to remain the same, everything must change.'
Things do change. In one of the film's most important scenes, the local mayor Don Calogero, arrives at the palace for dinner. The family laugh at this man (who is now as rich as the prince) wearing a badly cut tail coat. But the smiles are wiped off their faces when he presents his daughter Angelica, who will marry Tancredi. She is beautiful, sensuous and outgoing, representative of a class whose time has come. The contrast between her and the prince's daughters whose piety and narrow mindedness shows on their faces is pointed.
The prince sees his world disappearing but is cynical about the new world. He votes yes to unification but believes that the new Italy is based on lies and corruption symbolised for him by Don Calogero. Nothing can ever change, except for the worse, and the new ruling class will become just like the old one. `We were leopards and lions', he says, `those who come after us will be jackals, hyenas and sheep'.
The film makes constant references to decay and death from the stinking soldier's corpse in the aristocrat's garden in the opening scene through to the priest going to administer last rites at the end. The leopard looks on with a sense of detachment, as if he were outside what is going on. This comes out most strongly in the ball scene the final, hour long segment of a three hour film where 14 rooms of the palace are filmed as a single set which is about the prince's view of his life and its emptiness. He thinks of death increasingly. He despises his own classthe young women seen chattering on a huge ottoman he describes as being like monkeys through interbreeding.
At the same time he dislikes the new order an order where any hint of rebellion and social change has been crushed by a victorious bourgeoisie. Guest of honour at the ball is the victor of the battle of Aspromonte where the Piedmontese army turned on Garibaldi once the hero of unification, now too radical for the rulers of the new Italy. In the final scene we hear the last of the rebels being shot to make Italy safe for the bourgeoisie.
Visconti's achievement is to show this as history for today. He brings together an international cast of popular actors Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale to create a film which tells us as much about Italian society now as about its origins as a nation. The weakness of Italian capitalism led to corruption, Mafia based politics in the south and instability, but also to a strong working class movement the movement which helped form Visconti's politics.