In my grad school days, I took up World Literature for the Ph.D I was working on and never finished. Among the many works by many non-American and non-British authors I read was Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only novel, The Leopard (or Il Gattopardo in the original Italian). Lampedusa was an Italian nobleman, something of a recluse, whose work told the story of a Sicilian Prince who watches Italy modernize around him until he finds the world he knew once is now gone, and as an old man, that there’s not much he can do about it. I remember liking it at the time, but not a whole lot more than that and how the title character’s nephew is much more the modern man that will succeed in the new Italy, largely with his uncle’s approval. As such, I am not really surprised that there’s a film adaptation of it.
I am a bit surprised that American actor Burt Lancaster had the lead here, but maybe I shouldn’t be. When I do these challenges, certain actors sometimes pop up more than others, and the Stacker list seems to be a bit Lancaster heavy as compared to the AFI list where I found a lot of William Holden and Faye Dunaway. I actually like that. I expect certain actors to pop up frequently during these challenges, and when it’s not one that leaps to mind right away, I can appreciate their work a bit better when I’m done.
The Leopard is the story of Don Fabrizio Corbera (Lancaster), the Prince of Salina in Sicily. It’s 1860, and Garibaldi is leading his redshirts on their crusade to unify Italy into the modern country it is today and not the smaller group of city-states and the like that it had been for centuries. Despite the fact there’s a war going on, the Prince doesn’t seem to worry too much. His wife (Rina Morelli) does plenty of that for the both of them, and when the Prince’s young nephew Tancredi (French actor Alain Delon) opts to join Garibaldi’s forces fighting against the king, the Prince disapproves but ultimately opts to support the young man. That, in many ways, is how the story of Don Fabrizio Corbera will go: he’s very hands-off and recognizes how a certain type of man will prosper in the Italy that is coming. He can recognize, rightfully, that Tancredi is that very man who will do what he needs to in order to maintain his position. If anything, Tancredi gives his reasoning for joining Garibaldi as precisely that: he is doing so to ensure the family stays in the position it is in, and he has a better chance of doing so fighting for what he correctly sees as the winning side.
It’s probably important to note that the novel and film are both telling the story of a foregone conclusion: Italy became a unified country. It didn’t as a nation abandon its nobility. Italy even had kings for a while. If anything, the formation of modern Italy owes a lot to Garibaldi. At least, that’s how I remember my high school world history. I’ll readily admit that my recollection may not be the best for something I learned my first year of high school, but I did really enjoy that class. Plus, a lot of this history did come back to me as I was reading the novel. The point is, I didn’t go reading Wikipedia for a refresher for Garibaldi, so take anything I say about Italian history with a grain of salt. It’s probably not that vital I get it right so much as I relate my ideas on the film itself. And if I do get it right, good for me.
The ultimate point through all this, however, is that this is a tumultuous time for Italy, and the Prince is living through it. He has a rather unique view of how these things work, something he says he has noticed throughout his life and his various studies: while the people at the top may change, the actual customs and traditions largely don’t go anywhere. As such, he isn’t likely to assert himself to, say, maintain his personal position or anything along those lines. He just basically believes not much changes. The film treats the Prince as a wise and benevolent figure, and it turns out this was one of Lancaster’s favorites of his own work. He’s magnanimous and admired, but he also doesn’t seem inclined to step in and shape things himself. Early in the film, it looks like Tancredi will marry one of the Prince’s daughters. Later one, he marries Angelica Sedara (Claudia Cardinale), the beautiful daughter of a local mayor, himself a rising figure in local circles. The Prince’s wife (and presumably the spurned daughter) takes this very hard, and while she can’t stop crying over her daughter’s rejection, the Prince had blessed the union and even saw the wisdom of it. Tancredi is an ambitious man, and if he wants to get ahead, he would need to make a move like that. Besides, it’s not as if the spurned daughter won’t find another match on her own.
That’s one of the nice contrasts between the Prince and his wife: while he generally takes things in stride and recognizes that changes like this happen and are necessary, she’s inclined to burst into hysterical tears whenever things go wrong. No wonder he has a side piece in a nearby village.
It isn’t hard to see the appeal of the Prince’s world. Sure, he thinks things will probably be fine in the end. His chaplain (Romolo Valli) may be expressing concern that the redshirts may start claiming Church land, preventing the Church from helping the poor, but that’s pretty rich coming from a man who seems to be living in the Prince’s palace and working out of an office he shares with the most powerful nobleman in the region. Others complain about changes, and the Prince sees it as natural. It isn’t until the ballroom scene at the end of the film that it finally hits the Prince what happened. He may be able to momentarily assume his own regality through a dance with his nephew’s charming wife, but he’ll still be walking home alone, mourning a lifestyle that has come and gone. He was never a villain, and even Tancredi as the representative of the new regime doesn’t seem particularly evil or anything. He’s just different, and there’s no room for a man like the Prince in the new order of a new Italy, something he only somewhat grasped until he found himself in a ballroom full of newly moneyed strangers.
Now, I said above that I had read the novel that was the basis for this film, and I figured even then that the author was basing his main character on himself. That being in the days of dial-up Internet and no Wikipedia, I didn’t really have much to go on to figure that aside from a very brief author’s bio on my copy of the novel. There’s a part of me today that looks at the story a little differently. Maybe it’s due to my exposure to Downton Abbey and the general knowledge that that show’s creator Jullian Fellows seemed to be writing a, shall we say, somewhat wistful look back at a time when English noblemen still had gigantic houses and ran small villages or some such. My gradual disenchantment with what had started off as a very promising series, besides how often the show simply seemed to reuse the same plots again and again, was this idea that everything was better when these men born into power and privilege would just benevolently watch over their communities, ignoring that there was nothing to that system that guaranteed these men were necessarily benevolent. I feel a little bit like that when it comes to The Leopard today, the one difference being, Don Fabrizio Corbera is someone who can and will fade away when the times change, and even when asked to take a hand in shaping things, he always declined and opted to just keep living his life. I just can’t see the Granthams doing that sort of thing.
NEXT: Remember what I said about Burt Lancaster and the Stacker List up above? Well, he’s sticking around for the next entry too, and this time, I’ll be hearing his voice and not some Italian voiceover. Be back soon for the 1957 film noir Sweet Smell of Success.
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