The Leopard

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

Herald rating (* * * * *)

One of the great masterpieces of 20th-century cinema, The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) had an unhappy early history. Twentieth Century Fox had insisted - to the horror of director Luchino Visconti - on casting Burt Lancaster as the ageing Sicilian prince trying to survive the risorgimento, Italy's great national revival in the mid-19th century.

But, later, Visconti was convinced, calling Lancaster "the most perfectly mysterious man I have ever met". The film is regarded as a high point in Lancaster's career. Cigar-chompers at Fox were less impressed. The film opened in America, clumsily dubbed into English, with 40 minutes hacked out. "It is a work for which I acknowledge no paternity at all," Visconti said, adding that Hollywood treated Americans "like a public of children".

In 1980, four years after Visconti's death, the film's cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno supervised this restoration which, at 185 minutes, is still shorter than the now-lost 205-minute version Visconti intended. It is, by any standards, a sumptuous and impressive epic. An intimate knowledge of the politics of Italy in the Garibaldi era would help the viewer, but The Leopard also works as an intimate personal drama of loyalty and betrayal.

It's a sort of Italian Gone With The Wind. The opening battle sequences are magnificent pieces of directorial choreography, though quaintly tame in the Saving Private Ryan era.

It is also notable - as the American film was - for the minute examination of the rituals and details of a patrician way of life which is as visually extravagant as it is emotionally repressed.

Magnificently designed, costumed and lensed, this is one of the films of the century.

CAST: Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, Claudia Cardinale, Paolo Stoppa, Romolo Valli

RUNNING TIME: 185 minutes

RATING: PG (violence)

SCREENING: Bridgeway from Dec 2

FIRST RELEASED: 1963