Last night, once again courtesy of TCM, I got to see a film I'd been wanting to see for years:
Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), with Burt Lancaster and the unbelievably handsome Alain Delon.
Years ago I read about this movie, or, rather, about the author of the book on which it is based, in--where else?--
The New Yorker. The
New Yorker article compared
The Leopard to an Italian
Gone With the Wind, and I think the comparison is apt, as long as you don't push it too much.
The story takes place in and about 1860, as Italy is at last being unified under the House of Savoy, the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Sardinia, centered in the north of Italy with its capital at Turin. Lancaster plays Fabrizio, prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat, and Delon is his nephew, Tancredi. So the movie takes place at roughly the same time as
GWTW, and the central character is a man trying to make his way through rapidly changing times, as the world he knew is being replaced by a new order--much as Scarlett O'Hara does the best she can to make her way as the world she grew up in comes to an end and is replaced with a new and unfamiliar world.
The movie is in Italian--logically enough--with subtitles, but I found the subtitles difficult to read at times because they were in white and often projected over the fabulous colors of the film. Lancaster was dubbed into Italian--clearly, it wasn't his voice--so it was kind of odd to read subtitles for the dialogue of an English-speaking actor who was dubbed into Italian.
The early part of the movie was a little confusing because I'm not that conversant with Italian history. I knew about the
Risorgimento in a general sort of way, and that the Red Shirts, followers of the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi, fought to unify the country. Early in the movie, Tancredi goes off to join the Red Shirts; there is a battle sequence, and Tancredi is wounded, but not badly. What I wasn't clear about at all was
who the Red Shirts were fighting in Sicily and southern Italy.
Fortunately I still had an old World History text in my library, so after the movie was over I reviewed the section on Italian unification. Turns out that at the time of unification, Sicily and southern Italy constituted the Kingdom of Naples, also known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (though I don't know why), which was ruled by a branch of the old Bourbon family. So presumably the Red Shirts were fighting to overthrow the Bourbon dynasty in southern Italy in order to unite the region with Sardinia. So that cleared up for me who the Red Shirts were fighting.
I liked the movie very much, despite its being in Italian--with the subtitles it was sort of like watching a silent movie with a lot of noise in the background instead of music. At the end the movie has an extended and very gorgeous sequence set at a ball. The cinematography is beautiful--not just at the ball but throught the whole movie.
Topic: Resurrecting the Movies thread... (Read 1037520 times)