Many great films have an unhappy history. The excesses of some of cinema’s greatest artists have lead their work to be shortened and altered by insensitive producers and studio heads who somehow believe that this might help the film’s box office returns. The constant struggle in filmmaking between Art and Commerce is never more apparent than in the multitude of mangled masterpieces that litter the highways of film history. In The Birth of Tragedy German philosopher-madman Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, "Though the favourites of the gods die young, they also live eternally in the company of gods." The same could be said of cinema. It seems that the greater the film, the greater its destruction. Many of cinema’s most intense and creative expressions read like battered cases from an old police file. Tragic victims thrust into a world that couldn’t comprehend them. And it is ironic that these are the very films that years later are lionized and painstakingly restored by those who want to return them to their former glory. Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1925), Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984) are but three examples. Many of Italian director Luchino Visconti’s (1906-1976) films suffered this martyrdom, and they have all been restored. And The Leopard, considered by so many to be his masterpiece, can now be seen, 40 years later, as Visconti always intended it to be seen.

Set during the Risorgimento period, The Leopard follows an aristocratic Sicilian family, headed by Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster). It begins in 1860 with Garibaldi's invasion of Sicily. While Don Fabrizio represents the old way of life, his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon), who leaves to join Garibaldi’s revolutionary forces, represents the new. This film is the second Visconti set during this period of Italy’s history, the first being Senso (1954) which takes place during the last days of the Austrian occupation of Venice. It is no coincidence that Visconti has set two films during this period of historical transition -- the passing of one political order and its accompanying way of life for another, and the inevitable disintegration of everything, is a theme he returns to again and again. In The Leopard this disintegration is examined on both a personal level, looking at how these changes affect an individual, and on a larger social level, looking at how these changes affect a family. The Leopard constantly shifts between these two poles, and while social and political criticism emerge through seeing how the Risorgimento affects Don Fabrizio’s family, the true emotional intensity of this film lies in seeing how it affects Don Fabrizio himself.

Many of Visconti’s protagonists move towards a realization of the ephemerality of all existence. In Visconti’s Death in Venice (Morte a Venezia) (1971) Gustav von Aschenbach grasps the ephemerality of beauty, of true beauty, just moments before he dies, in an image that mirrors the final moments of Visconti’s Conversation Piece (Gruppo di famiglia in un interno) (1974) in which a dying professor realizes and regrets all that has passed and all that he has let pass. Don Fabrizio’s own realization is brought out in The Leopard’s justly famous 45-minute ballroom sequence. This scene is a meditation by Fabrizio on the transience of life and his own mortality. As he slowly walks through the rooms and passes the waltzing couples he begins to accept the changes that have occurred, and comes to the sad realization that his way of life, that his very essence, is fading, vanishing into the dark inescapable whirlpool of history. As he says, "We were the leopards, the lions. Our place will be taken by jackals, by hyenas..."

The Leopard is one of Luchino Visconti’s most accessible films. It has none of the rape, incest, pedophilia or perversity that informs such a large part of his oeuvre. We are spared the spectacle of Visconti’s lover, Austrian actor Helmut Berger, in drag, doing an impersonation of Marlene Dietrich, or watching him rape a young girl, and then his own mother. The Leopard has all the vibrancy and romanticism of Visconti’s earlier more Neo-realist works and none of the coldness that was so characteristic of his later. And while his later works, especially his final two films, Conversation Piece and The Innocent (L’Innocente) (1976), are geared towards an intellectual and contemplative appreciation, The Leopard comes from a period in Visconti’s career when he was making films that appealed directly to the emotions. The result is a film that brings together everything Visconti does best: a grand sweeping operatic vision of decline, a depth of characterization and psychological shading, and a slow build-up of emotional pressure that eventually bursts out of sheer intensity.

There is an anecdote often told about Visconti. Once, after watching an opera, he tried to go backstage to see the diva Maria Callas. When stopped by an usher he yelled, "Don’t you know who I am?" The usher replied, "Yes ... and I know that you are going to die ... just the same as I am." An angered Visconti retorted, "You, yes ... me, no." Did Visconti pour so much of his life into his art in order to achieve a kind of immortality? It is true that in The Leopard we feel his presence and personality in every frame. But every frame also reminds us of a world that has vanished, a world that the aristocratic Visconti, (he came from one of the oldest, richest, and noblest families in Milan), despite being a Marxist, loved deeply. If Visconti’s work does immortalize him, it paradoxically establishes even more strongly the impossibility of not passing away. And if there’s one thing that reverberates throughout The Leopard, and throughout his work in general, it is an awareness of how everything passes. Visconti expresses cinematically, and with an intensely idiosyncratic flair, what Edward Fitzgerald distilled verbally, in the century before Visconti was living and working, when he wrote in his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."