A noble beast Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	Il gattopardo/The Leopard Directed by Luchino Visconti. Written by Visconti, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Enrico Medioli, and Massimo Franciosa, based on the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. With Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Alain Delon, Lucilla Morlacchi, and Paolo Stoppa. In Italian with English subtitles (185 minutes). At the Brattle September 24 through October 3.

Luchino Visconti’s Il gattopardo/The Leopard opens without pretension. It’s Palermo in May of 1860, the year of Garibaldi. We’re in the palazzo of Fabrizio, prince of Salina, the family reciting the rosary as a bit of breeze ruffles the curtains and dispels the heat. Outside, there’s a mounting commotion, shouts and servants running everywhere. The family members look at one another, but the priest goes on until, at last, Don Fabrizio stands up and closes the book. Even the aristocracy can ignore only so much of what’s happening in the real world.

Visconti’s 1963 masterpiece, which is celebrating its 41st birthday with a week-plus of showings at the Brattle Theatre (there’s also now a Criterion Collection three-DVD set with the Italian original and the cut-and-subbed English version plus a feature on the making of the film), had a similarly unprepossessing history. The novel on which it’s based, by Sicilian nobleman Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, couldn’t find a publisher until 1958, two years after his death, and then in an edition of a mere 3000 copies; it went on to be a bestseller here as well as in Italy. Visconti got Twentieth Century Fox to back the film on condition he use a big-name American actor (who turned out to be Burt Lancaster, as the prince). According to one report, Fox executives didn’t even understand the movie was being made in Italian; in any case, they cut the 205-minute original by 40 minutes. In 1983, a new print was made and 20 minutes were restored.

It’s a mark of Visconti’s genius that he achieves greatness here by not doing very much. He barely explains the politics of the Risorgimento; his non-partisan approach to the fighting between Garibaldi’s redshirts and Francis II’s soldiers, the arbitrariness of who lives or dies, takes the film beyond politics. Don Fabrizio understands that it’s not the royalists who will emerge victorious, or the revolutionaries, but the rising bourgeoisie. "Everything has to change," he tells the family priest, "if we want everything to remain as it is." So though his daughter Concetta (Lucilla Morlacchi) is in love with his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), Don Fabrizio arranges for Tancredi, who’s hoping for a career in the new government of Victor Emmanuel II, to marry Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the beautiful and only daughter of a wealthy, social-climbing local mayor. "We were the Leopards, the Lions," the prince muses. (The Salina crest is a leopard; the Leopard of the title is, of course, Don Fabrizio himself.) "Those who replace us will be the jackals, the hyenas."

Yet Visconti, like Tomasi di Lampedusa, knows that this change is inevitable. Don Fabrizio’s sons are polite but without drive; the pious, tight-lipped Concetta takes after her mother, who crosses herself when her husband kisses her and, after seven children, still hasn’t let him see her navel. The film turns on the moment of Angelica’s first appearance, at a Salina dinner party to which her father has been invited. Concetta and Tancredi are talking pleasantly when, in an instant, Concetta’s face freezes in dismay and Tancredi’s lights up in delight. Only then does Visconti show us Angelica entering the room, sharing the screen with an enormous arrangement of flowers. It’s not just money that Concetta lacks. (The Salina fortune will have to be divided among all his children.) It’s bloom.

Alain Delon’s Tancredi is so goodhearted and enthusiastic that it’s easy to overlook his easy switches of allegiance, from redshirt to regular army, or from Concetta to Angelica. Cardinale is as radiant here as in Fellini’s 8-1/2, an earth goddess who can laugh at a tasteless joke one moment and mazurka magnificently the next. (The sublime 45-minute ball scene that closes the film suggests Gone with the Wind directed by John Ford.) As for Lancaster, his lines are dubbed by an Italian actor, so he has to do everything with his body, and he balances the directness and energy of his roles in From Here to Eternity and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral with the prince’s weary desire for sleep. He’d always played a man of action; here, in his greatest part, he’s a man of thought, a man of principle, the embodiment of Hemingway’s definition of courage. He and Delon and Cardinale and Visconti and Tomasi di Lampedusa make this the shortest 185-minute movie you’ll ever see.