Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of Lampedusa’s novel opens with the camera sweeping gracefully over the grounds of a grand Palazzo, accompanied by Nino Rota’s romantic score played by a symphony orchestra. The camera glides through the palace’s French doors and enters an elaborately decorated room where Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina and his large, elegantly dressed family kneel in prayer led by the Prince’s confidant, Father Pirrone. Their devotions are interrupted by a commotion in the garden; the Prince stops the prayer and calls out for a servant to investigate the cause of the disturbance. We soon learn that the gardeners have discovered a soldier’s corpse.

It’s the spring of 1860; Garibaldi and his Thousand, along with an army of local rebels, are moving on Palermo. The dead soldier in the garden is a sign of the times.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is one of the great novels on my bucket-list of to-be-reads, however, that bucket is overflowing with books while my bucket of time to read is running out. To paraphrase Cecil Rhodes’ apocryphal famous last words: So many great books, so little time.

While I’ve yet to tackle the novel, I’ve seen Visconti’s film several times since its initial 1963 U.S. release. I’d place the screen version of The Leopard at or near the top of my favorite historical films, although I don’t share its pessimistic worldview. Don Fabrizio’s answer to Scarlett O’Hara’s “Tomorrow is another day,” would probably be, “Yes, and it will be worse than today and much worse than yesterday.”

The political, social and economic complexities of the Risorgimento (the 19th century unification of Italy) are beyond the scope of this post; the film itself is limited to the critical years 1860-1862 (the novel continues on into the early 20th century), during which the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was incorporated into Piedmont-Sardinia, whose king, Victor Emanuel, extended his reign to a modern unified Italy.

The film focuses on the relationship between Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster) and his favorite nephew Don Tancredi, Count Falconeri (Alain Delon).

Tancredi is handsome, intelligent, charming, brave, pragmatic, cunning and opportunistic; a man for troubled and changing times, sort of a Sicilian Rhett Butler. He’s also lucky. For example, he picks the winning side, joining the rebel army led by Garibaldi in the battle for Palermo. During the fierce street fighting, Tancredi receives a wound that enhances his reputation and gains him promotion, while costing him little in terms of health and good looks. Later on, he’ll abandon Garibaldi’s revolutionaries and take a commission in the new king’s army. Tancredi’s famous line, delivered during a political discussion with his uncle, sets forth one of the novel’s main themes: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

Following his nephew’s advice, the Prince accepts change, with some reservations. He’ll accept King Victor Emanuel’s new government to avoid a republic; he’ll accept Tancredi’s marriage to the daughter of the wealthy parvenu, Don Calogaro Sedara, to bring Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), a vivacious, hot-blooded beauty with a large dowry, into the family.

Prior to meeting Angelica, Tancredi carries on a flirtation with his cousin, Concetta; she in turn falls in love with him. She asks Father Pirrone to convey her feelings to her father. But the Prince knows his modest daughter is no match for his dashing, ambitious nephew. Furthermore, while the Prince is wealthy he has a large family, palaces, servants and lands to maintain; he can’t provide a dowry sufficient to meet Tancredi’s needs. In that regard, the Prince is pragmatic, like his nephew. He will accept an alliance with a newly rich, lower-class family, to advance Tancredi’s career and provide financial and political life-support for the Salinas and the Falconeri.

Don Fabrizio tells Father Pirrone, “You know what is happening in our country? Nothing... simply an imperceptible replacement of one class for another. The middle class doesn't want to destroy us. It simply wants to take our place... and very gently.”

When a representative of the new regime offers Don Fabrizio the prestigious position of senator, arguing that he could bring the benefits of progress and good government to his people, the Prince replies:
"The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect. Their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders ... upsets their illusion of achieved perfection…Sleep, my dear Chevalley, eternal sleep, that is what Sicilians want. And they will always resent anyone who tries to awaken them, even to bring them the most wonderful of gifts. And, between ourselves, I doubt very strongly whether this new Kingdom has very many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian expression, even the most violent, is really a wish for death. Our sensuality, wish for oblivion. Our knifings and shootings, a hankering after extinction. Our laziness, our spiced and drugged sherbets, a desire for voluptuous immobility, that is... for death again.”

The government official persists, and the Prince adds for emphasis: “I belong to an unlucky generation, astride between two worlds and ill-at-ease in both. And what is more, I am completely without illusions. Now, what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty for self-deception, an essential requisite for wanting to guide others. No, I cannot lift a finger in politics. It would be bitten off.”
When the official leaves, Don Fabrizio bids him farewell with the following:

“All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always' of course, a century, two centuries... and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be jackals, hyenas, sheep; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”

The Leopard is a beautiful film, but its beauty is skillfully juxtaposed with the unsightly; lush landscapes against hardscrabble back country; elegant nobles and ragged peasants; lavish palaces and squalid slums. Beginning with the dead soldier in the lush garden and the prayer Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae (Now and at the hour of our death) there are constant reminders of mortality, considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of earthly goods and pursuits. These images of death and decay are evident throughout the film.

The brilliant ball and banquet sequence displays Visconti’s film-making at its best; the scenes are filled with the trappings of wealth and power, punctuated by images of human imperfection, weakness and mortality: a deathbed painting of a man surrounded by his grieving family; the Prince, who through most of the film appears virile and imposing, suddenly feeling old and tired; the image of the Prince weeping as he examines his handsome, but aging face in a mirror; a glance at a bathroom filled with recently used chamber pots; a group of chattering aristocratic young women, the product of “frequent marriages between cousins,” whom the Prince compares to “…monkeys, ready to clamber up the chandeliers and swing by their tails showing their behinds.”

The time is late 1862. Italy has been united under King Victor Emanuel, with two exceptions: Venetia and the Papal States. In June of that year, without support from the new government, the anticlerical Garibaldi landed in Sicily to recruit volunteers for a march on Rome. The government sent a division of the regular army under Colonel Pallavicini to stop Garibaldi and his recruits. In August, the two forces met in the Aspromonte. One of the regulars fired the first shot; several volleys followed killing a few of Garibaldi’s followers. The battle was over quickly, as Garibaldi, who remained loyal to the newly United Kingdom of Italy, ordered his men not to fire on the regulars.

Many of the volunteers were taken prisoner, including Garibaldi, who was seriously wounded. Garibaldi was imprisoned while he received medical attention. Once his wound had healed, he was released.

Pallavicini and his officers are honored guests at the ball. Presumably, the other attendees know that a group of soldiers, who deserted the new king’s army to join Garibaldi, will be executed at dawn. Tancredi supports the impending executions; he is not bothered by the fact that the men about to be shot may be his former comrades. Concetta is appalled; she says Tancredi’s “changed.” She’s wrong. Like the colonel, Tancredi was always pragmatic and opportunistic, a realist rather than an idealist. What’s changed is Concetta’s romantic illusion of her charming cousin; for the first time she sees him as he really is.

The ball is over. Rather than return to his palace in a carriage, the Prince chooses to walk home through the squalid streets and alleys. A priest passes by, on his way to a hovel to give the last rites to one of his poor parishioners. The Prince, in his impeccably tailored evening clothes, kneels on the filthy pavement. He prays:
“O faithful star... when will you give me an appointment less ephemeral, far from all this, in your own region of perennial certitude?”

The film began with the Prince on his knees, praying the Rosary with his family. While reciting the Catholic prayer, the fastidious Prince knelt on a handkerchief to protect his fine trousers from the slightest speck of dirt. At the end of the film, the Prince kneels in a dirty backstreet while praying to Venus, the morning and evening star.

“Perennial certitude,” does not necessarily mean eternal certainty; unlike at the beginning of the film, the Prince is not praying for the eternal life promised by the Church. That prayer requires faith beyond both reason and experience. Don Fabrizio is a realist, a pragmatist, and a scientist. According to science, the star can be relied upon to appear in its own “region of certitude” for the remainder of Don Fabrizio’s lifetime, and for many years to come. And that region is “far from all this,” that is to say far from the pain, misery and mutability of our brief lives.

While the Prince is praying to his star, Don Calogaro, Tancredi, and Angelica return home in a carriage. They hear the sharp crack of the firing-squad’s rifles. Don Calogaro smiles as he praises an army that will protect his family and their interests. Tancredi and Angelica rest peacefully in each other’s arms.

Cut to the Prince; he rises to his feet and walks off into the darkness to the sound of the orchestra playing Nino Rota’s beautiful romantic theme. The film ends.

Visconti’s The Leopard is an outstanding film adaptation of a great historical novel, and I highly recommend it. Yet, as I said earlier, its dark pessimism troubles me.

Toward the end of my novel, The Devil in Montmartre, Inspector Achille Lefebvre makes a comment to his wife, Adele, that’s worthy of Lampedusa’s Prince: “We can’t overcome human nature. People prefer self-serving lies to unflattering truths and blame others for their own faults. We’ll have technological progress all right. The times change, but people remain the same.”
When Adele rebukes Achille for being cynical, he replies: “What would you have me say?”
“Simply this, my love,” she answers. “Even though we know it won’t come in our lifetime, or the next generation, or the one after that, we should hope for an era of love and peace, we should strive for it.”
“Of course, Adele,” Achille replies, “but until that time I’ll settle for just laws and honest, capable, and compassionate people to enforce them.”

As much as I admire Visconti's film and the novel upon which it’s based, I would have liked the Prince to have used his prestige and influence to fight for justice and a better living standard for his people. Such ambitious dreams might not have been realized in a lifetime but, with will, courage and effort, they could have been initiated for the benefit of future generations. Isn’t it better to struggle for what’s right rather than surrendering to the current pack of “jackals and hyenas,” retreating to a safe space and spending one’s life longing for a “region of perennial certitude”? The answer may be found in the following quote from Joseph Epstein’s “Ambition”.
“All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.”