The Leopard was released in 1963, at a time when European cinema was once again becoming explicitly politicized; not just the exploits of the nouvelle vague in France, but so too in Poland, Spain, the UK, and most significantly a crop of post-Neorealist Italian films by new directors: Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano (1961), Bernardo Bertolucci's La commare secca (1962) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962). In this context, why was professed Marxist director Visconti making an historical epic, what looks to be misty-eyed nostaglia for his feudal ancestry, now something of a relic in the politically divisive scene of 1960s Italy? How does this fit in to his oeuvre of socially-committed films?
The answer is in the source novel as much as it is in the film. In Lampedusa, though significantly not filmed by Visconti, we flash forward in the final chapter fifty years to see the Salina household decades after the Prince's death. The palace is a relic, haunted by its grandiose past, yet outside of it the ordinary people of Sicily are no better off than they were before. For many, the Risorgimento was a failed, compromised revolution, a triumph of the bourgeoisie, the third estate who would replace the aristocracy as the oppressors of the masses, a theme already explored by the director in Senso.
For dramatic flow, Visconti leaves this final chapter out of his film in order for it to concentrate more on the Prince's view of his own mortality, but the politics are still there; in many ways the spectacular final ball sequence, lasting some 45 minutes, forms as political a denouement, where the demise of the aristocratic order, personified by the Prince, seems silently to unravel before our very eyes. At times both the novel and the film dare to suggest that the old feudal system was much better for ordinary folk than what followed – a position sure to infuriate professional intellectuals, and one which surely only the likes of Lampedusa and Visconti would try to defend. The over-the-top vulgarity of Don Calogero as played in the film shows that while Lampedusa may have a little respect for such a Machiavellian creature, Visconti has little but scorn.
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