Visconti, then, is politically engaged like his contemporaries, but so too in his own idiosyncratically contradictory way, much like Pasolini and Bertolucci were in their own ways. With Visconti there is something of a commonality with Jean Renoir, the great French director under whom he served his apprenticeship as directorial assistant on Toni (1935) and Partie de campagne (1936). Renoir's twin masterpieces, La grande illusion (1937) and La règle du jeu (1939) both examined the mores of the higher classes with a certain degree of sympathy. So too is there an aesthetic debt to Renoir. Those interiors shot in deep-focus, those carefully controlled gliding camera moves, the painstaking attention to spatial arrangement of mises en scène all bear the hallmarks of the French master.
The interiors of the Prince's world are more obviously lovingly rendered, but it must not be neglected how much the exteriors are too. Two years earlier, cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo had brought the stifling heat and beautiful if oppressive landscape of Sicily to life in the black and white of Francesco Rosi's Salvatore Giuliano, and here that is built upon in colour by Rotunno in a series of stunning outdoor scenes. In particular, the morning after the plebiscite on unification we see the island, so much a character in itself in the book, awakening under a literal new dawn, if not a metaphorical one.
That same day, the Prince and the accountant Don Ciccio, discuss the new political situation, all framed by the golden mountainous landscape stretching as far as the eye can see. “That America of antiquity” as Lampedusa describes it – do they not recall cinema's similar renderings of the barren, hostile American West? Aptly, Sicily will later serve as such for the Andolinis and Corleones when Francis Ford Coppola films it in those greatest of American films, The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) — films not by coincidence scored too by the peerless Nino Rota. Another Italian-American, Martin Scorsese, marvelled at Visconti's use of colour, borrowing heavily from it for his own The Age of Innocence (1993). But as Peter Bondanella suggests, the lavish visuals are always in danger of overwhelming the film's politics; perhaps this is why it is not embraced as widely as it should be.
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