60 years of The Leopard
On March 27, 1963, Luchino Visconti's masterpiece "Il Gattopardo (The Leopard)" premiered at the Barberini Cinema in Rome. (IMDB and the English-language Wikipedia indicate, and Kinopoisk repeats at their suggestion, that film "The Leopard" was shown for the first time on January 2, 1963 at a festival in Mexican Acapulco. But the archive of this festival reports that in 1963 it was held from November 24 to December 7. So, once again we have to state the factual slovenliness of the above-mentioned sources of information.)
With this film, or rather, its title, there is another inaccuracy. The name "Il Gattopardo" literally translates from Italian as "ocelot" or "serval". Two months after the Rome premiere, the film was presented to guests and participants of the Cannes International Film Festival, but under the name "Le Guepard" ("Cheetah"). It was shown under the same name in Canada, Switzerland, Bulgaria and some other countries. In August 1963, the film was released in theaters in the United States, but under the name "The Leopard", and this name was used in film distribution in many countries. Along with the names mentioned, there were other options: "wild cat", "tiger cat" and even "panther". In other words, film distributors went through almost the entire list of names of representatives of the cat family. But, since in most countries, including the USSR, the name "The Leopard" has taken root, we will stick to this version.
The script of the film by Luchino Visconti is based on the novel of the same name by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, born in 1896. The full name of the author of the novel looks like this: Don Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa, 12th Duke of Palma, Baron of Montechiaro, Baron della Torretta. One enumeration of noble titles from the name of the author of the novel is enough to understand how ancient and how aristocratic was the family to which Giuseppe Tomasi belonged. Giuseppe Tomasi became a writer only at the end of his life: at about the age of 60, he suspected cancer and decided to leave a mark on the Earth. To this end, in 1954 he began writing a novel about his great-grandfather, Prince Giulio Fabrizio Tommasi.
The novel was completed in 1956. I can't judge the literary merits of the novel, I haven't read it. But it is known that three leading Italian publishing houses, where the novel was sent, refused to print it. But everything changed after the author's death, which occurred in 1957 due to lung cancer. In 1958, the novel was published, and in 1959 he was awarded the literary "Strega Prize". This award was established in 1947 by the manufacturer of the popular Italian herbal "Strega Liqueur". From that moment on, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel was ranked among the classic works of Italian literature and soon became a bestseller.
The success of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel in the book market attracted the attention of the Titanus film company to it. The producer of Titanus, Goffredo Lombardo, acquired the rights to the film adaptation of the novel. Initially, Mario Soldati was appointed director of the future film, then he was replaced by Ettore Giannini, who even wrote a draft of the script. However, according to Goffredo Lombardo, Giannini was too carried away by the military-political theme, pushing the theme of Tancredi and Angelica's love into the background. As a result, Giannini was suspended from work, and Luchino Visconti was invited to the position of director, who at that time, after the success of the film "Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and his brothers)", was extremely in demand.
Luchino Visconti accepted the invitation with great enthusiasm. For him, a duke with communist convictions, the theme of the aristocracy in the context of the revolution was extremely interesting. To work on the script, he attracted a proven team led by Suzo Cecchi D'Amico, with whom he created the script for the film "Rocco and His Brothers".
For the main role of Prince Salina, Lukino Visconti, fascinated by the images of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible in the films of the same name by Sergei Eisenstein, dreamed of inviting the famous Soviet actor Nikolai Cherkasov. An invitation was sent to the star of Soviet cinema. But... It remained unanswered. The lack of an answer suggests that the decision for Cherkasov was made by "higher comrades". There could be several reasons for such a "vague" decision. Firstly, the leadership of the Soviet cinema has always been very jealous of invitations to Soviet movie stars coming from abroad. Only selected and trusted comrades could receive such permission. Secondly, the opinion of the Italian Communists may have been taken into account. The Italian Communist Party and Palmiro Togliatti personally gave a very negative assessment of the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. According to the Italian communists, the role of the Garibaldians was misrepresented in the novel, there was no proper class assessment of the revolutionary movement of Italy at the end of the 19th century. It is possible that the management of Goskino "recommended" Cherkasov to refuse to participate in the film adaptation of the work, negatively perceived by Italian comrades.
Visconti's next choice for the lead role in a film was the great British actor and director Laurence Olivier, whose performance as Mark Crassus in Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" impressed the director greatly. However, Olivier refused, citing being busy. And this could very well be true, given Olivier's enormous employment both in film and in the theater.
While Luchino Visconti was busy looking for an actor for the main role, the Titanus film company was looking for money for the production of the film. The fact is that Visconti, being approved as the director of the future film, requested a colossal budget at that time of almost 3 billion Italian lira (approximately $ 4.64 million, the equivalent of the current $ 46 million). To satisfy the director's requests, the film company lacked $ 3 million. When Goffredo Lombardo asked Visconti to moderate his appetites, he replied that he would shoot the film only with the requested budget, or would not shoot at all.
The American film company Twentieth Century Fox offered its services to finance the project. But on the terms of the right to distribute the picture in the United States. And provided that the main role in the film will be played by an American movie star. Specifically, Burt Lancaster. Visconti's first reaction to this proposal was sharply negative: "Сowboy! To play an aristocrat? What a nonsense!" But there were no other options. In addition, Visconti watched the film "Judgment at Nuremberg" by Stanley Kramer with Lancaster in one of the main roles and, reluctantly, agreed.
However, relations between Visconti and Lancaster continued to be very strained for a long time. What the American actor himself contributed to. The fact is that, as is often the case in film production, Visconti decided to start shooting (while there is enough money in the budget) from the most expensive scene - the ball scene. Or rather, the part where Prince Salina (Lancaster) dances with Angelica (Claudia Cardinale). And it must have happened that Lancaster had injured his leg the day before and could not dance. The ball, to which 250 extras were invited, as well as 120 dressers, make-up artists, artists and hairdressers, had to be postponed. And that means - to pay downtime. Visconti was furious.
Unable to replace Lancaster, the director expressed his negative attitude towards him in his own way. If a separate personal dressing room was allocated for the director's favorite, Alain Delon, then Lancaster was forced to share a common dressing room with all the other actors. And to wait for hours for his turn to use it. In the end, the patience of the American movie star came to an end, and during the filming he burst into a diatribe full of anger and passion. After this speech, relations between Visconti and Lancaster returned to normal.
As noted above, in May 1963, "The Leopard" by Luchino Visconti took part in the Cannes International Film Festival, where, by the decision of the jury headed by the French playwright Armand Salacrou, one of the presidents of the Goncourt Academy, it was awarded the main prize - the Palm d'Or. At the same time, Luchino Visconti's film was ahead of a number of worthy competitors, for example, such as Masaki Kobayashi's "Seppuku (Harakiri)", Robert Mulligan's "To Kill a Mockingbird", and Robert Aldrich's "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane". A little later, the Italian Film Academy awarded the film (tied with Andre Cayatt's French film "Le glaive et la balance (Two Are Guilty)" its David di Donatello Award. Luchino Visconti's film did not gain any other significant festival achievements.
But among the simple Italian public, the film was a great success. More than 12 million moviegoers watched it in Italian cinemas, making it one of the top 10 Italian box office films for the period from 1950 to 2016. Due to this success, the film managed to collect 2.323 billion Italian lire in Italy. However, this did not save the Titanus film company from ruin, the main reason for which was the failure of the film on the American film market. In America, the film grossed less than $180,000. More precisely, "The Leopard", whose box office receipts only slightly exceeded the costs of its production, could not cover the loss of more than two million dollars brought to the company by the previous film - "Sodom and Gomorrah" directed by Robert Aldrich and Sergio Leone. As a result, the Titanus company was forced to interrupt its film production for more than 20 years.
Analyzing the reasons for the failure of Luchino Visconti's picture on the American film market, Italian journalist Umberto Cantone in an article dated September 27, 2013 in the newspaper "Repubblica" actually laid the blame on the Twentieth Century Fox company, which carried out distribution in the United States. The Twentieth Century Fox film company, in order to bring the film closer to the tastes of the American public, firstly, reduced its duration by about 40 minutes, and, secondly, presented it as a western (again, focusing on the tastes of the American moviegoer). Umberto Cantone described the spectacle offered to American moviegoers under the name "The Leopard":
"Ed ecco The Leopard in salsa hollywoodiana, spacciato per un western ambientato nell' esotico paesaggio di una Sicilia arcaica, sullo sfondo di un Risorgimento equiparato alla Guerra civile Usa, pubblicizzato come una pepata vicenda di "love and death" dove protagonista è l' eroe blasonato del titolo, raffigurato, nelle locandine d' epoca, come un cowboy con la lupara tra le mani, intenzionato a difendere la propria onorabilità , e quella della peasant girl Angelica, dalle iene borghesi in ascesa."
Of course, that the viewer, oriented to the described "vinaigrette", turned out to be completely unable to perceive a serious picture filled with philosophical understanding of some pages of Italian history. According to some reports, Burt Lancaster had a hand in editing the picture.
It is curious that Lancaster's negative role in the fate of The Leopard in America, however, for another reason, was noted by a very influential American film critic, The New York Times film reviewer Bosley Crowther. In his review, published literally the day after the release of the film on the American cinema screen, Crowther noted:
"unfortunately Mr. Lancaster does have that blunt American voice that lacks the least suggestion of being Sicilian in the English-dialogue version shown here. And either the role lacks the humor—the gentle irony—of di Lampedusa's Prince or Mr. Lancaster does not get it, which is a most regrettable miss. Alain Delon is also handsome and physically correct as the Prince's high-spirited nephew, but there isn't enough body in the role, not enough self-assertion, to make it truly meaningful. And the American voice that speaks for him is not appropriate."
It should be noted here that in the Italian version, another Italian actor spoke for Lancaster. And in the American - the star of the screen left the "right to voice" for himself. By the way, Claudia Cardinale also spoke in a different voice in the film, but for another reason: she, a native of Tunisia, had not yet managed to get rid of the French-Tunisian accent, incompatible with the image of a Sicilian. But the genuine laughter of Cardinale is preserved in the film.
After several decades, there was a rethinking of Visconti's picture by film critics. The guru of American film criticism, Roger Ebert, in a 2003 review, rated the film with maximum 4 stars, included it in his list of "Great Movies" and noted that Luchino Visconti was the only director who could adequately screen the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and Burt Lancaster, like no other, was suitable for the role of Prince Salina. Another American film critic, columnist for the influential Washington Post, Desson Thompson, in a 2005 review noted:
"Watching this masterwork (also known by its original Italian-language title, "Il Gattopardo") allows you to return to the filmmaking sensibility of the 1960s, when epics looked like epics, instead of today's computer-generated, merchandise-supporting affairs with digitalized armies and buff twenty-somethings playing grown-up warriors."
The great filmmaker Martin Scorsese included the film in his list of 12 favorite films.
The film was highly appreciated by Russian film critics. Yevgeny Nefedov, who rated the film with 10 points on a 10-point system, in a review from 2013, noted:
""Il Gattopardo" remains an example of a thoughtful (in fact, dialectical) understanding of the laws and vicissitudes of History, in which the high achievements of the spirit are closely intertwined with selfish calculation and base passions, and a specific person is sometimes able to render a colossal influence on the course of events."
One of the most authoritative film critics, Andrey Plakhov, wrote in a review from 2017:
"If The Leopard consisted only of a forty-five-minute ball scene, where Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale are circling around the mirror gallery of the Palazzo Gandji to the music of Verdi's waltz, clutching each other in their arms, the film would still like to watch endlessly."
Modern ordinary moviegoers, both in the United States and abroad, rated the film no less highly than modern film critics. 67% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10, and 21% of users rated the film with the highest score - "ten". Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Luchino Visconti's film "The Leopard" according to FilmGourmand was 8.122, thanks to which it took 568th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
