The Leopard | Telescope Film
The Leopard

The Leopard (Il gattopardo)

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  • Italy,
  • France
  • 1963
  • · 186m

Director Luchino Visconti
Cast Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Paolo Stoppa, Terence Hill, Pierre Clémenti
Genre Drama

As Garibaldi's troops begin to unify Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family adapts to the social changes undermining their way of life. Proud but pragmatic Prince Don Fabrizio Salina allows his war hero nephew, Tancredi, to marry Angelica, the beautiful daughter of gauche, bourgeois Don Calogero, to maintain the family's accustomed level of comfort and political clout.

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Nina Gallagher

Luchino Visconti's classic epic follows an aristocratic Sicilian family struggling to adjust to the changes in Sicilian culture during the Unification of Italy in the 1860s. Visconti's film, based on a novel of the same name, beautifully captures Italy's history and socioeconomic structure during the Risorgimento. Following Visconti's other epic works like Rocco and His Brothers, he explores the intricacies of Italian culture through the interpersonal relationships of his characters, condensing massive moments into epic and melodramatic narratives.

Yasmeen Gaber

Visconti's aristocratic roots show through his sympathy for a different time in Italian class consciousness. This epic film depicts the end of a family's era and the personal effects of a national revolution. Despite the film's tendency to eulogize the Sicilian aristocracy that crumbled for the sake of Italian unification, the quality of the film is on par with other epic films of the time and is beautifully and unapologetically melodramatic.

What are critics saying?

100

San Francisco Chronicle

One of the greatest of all epics.

100

Variety

Italy's top bestseller of recent literary history, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's The Leopard comes to the screen in a magnificent film, munificently outfitted and splendidly acted by a large cast dominated by Burt Lancaster. (Review of Original Release)

100

Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt

Smart and sumptuous.

100

Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington

Sumptuous and beautiful, suffused with a serene melancholy and deeply ambivalent love for a long-vanished past, Luchino Visconti's 1963 The Leopard is one of the greatest of all historical costume epics.

100

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

The Leopard is the greatest film of its kind made since World War II—its only rivals are Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon" and Visconti's own "Senso."

100

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

Virtually every Super Technirama frame of Luchino Visconti's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard could be described as "painterly" in its ornate details and exquisitely balanced color compositions. (Review of DVD Release)

100

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

The Leopard was written by the only man who could have written it, directed by the only man who could have directed it, and stars the only man who could have played its title character.

100

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

The film's superb first two hours, which weave social and historical themes into rich personal drama, turn out to be only a prelude to the magnificent final hour--an extended ballroom sequence that leaves history behind to become one of the most moving meditations on individual mortality in the history of the cinema. (Review of 1983 Release)

100

Variety by Staff (Not Credited)

Italy's top bestseller of recent literary history, Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa's The Leopard comes to the screen in a magnificent film, munificently outfitted and splendidly acted by a large cast dominated by Burt Lancaster. (Review of Original Release)

100

San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson

One of the greatest of all epics.

100

Washington Post by Desson Thomson

Watching this masterwork allows you to return to the filmmaking sensibility of the 1960s, when epics looked like epics.

100

Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas

The film is a glittering triumph of personal expression at its most elegant and opulent.

90

TV Guide Magazine

This is a gorgeous, fascinating account of the interplay between the personal and the social, directed with the kind of insight that only an aristocrat turned Marxist like Visconti could afford. (Review of Original Release)

90

The New York Times

For the most part, Nino Rota's music provides a rich melodic surrounding for the pictorial magnificence, and a heretofore unknown Verdi waltz that is played at the ball at the finish appropriately supplements this remarkably vivid, panoramic, and eventually morbid show. (Review of Original Release)