Tancredi Falconeri: If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.
More Alan Delon and Burt Lancaster completism. They were also paired in Scorpio a decade later. In three sittings due to inordinate length (3h5m), the realisation that much of it repays a close watch, the indirection of the dialogue/incompleteness of the subtitles, and that there's not a lot of plot. In glorious Technicolor and (dubbed) Italian. Directed by Luchino Visconti.
My knowledge of Italian history is very weak and this movie does not hold hands. Early on it's clear we're in Sicily at a historical moment and much later we're told it's the mid-nineteenth century, which would have already been clear to people familiar with Garibaldi's exploits. Patriarch/Prince Lancaster seeks to preserve his family's social position while accomodating the emerging political arrangements. Knowing the limitations of his own children and means he encourages nephew/war rake/man of flexible allegiance Delon to get organised with daughter-of-a-crass-bourgeois Claudia Cardinale in a fusion of aristocracy, money and beauty. Like much of Shakespeare, knowing how things have got to go does not spoil it at all.
There are many great scenes, many of which have large casts where the expressions and movements of the individuals diffuse the focus and broaden the presentation of character and relationship. For this reason it would help to see it on it a big screen. One instance is the initial scene, where Lancaster's family are at prayer, and a later one where he's reading from a book while the ladies engage in craftwork. And of course the dinner where Delon and Cardinale meet, and the climactic ball of the final forty plus minutes. And so on. Against these are some two-handers that work well in tight: somewhat secular Lancaster jousting with priest Romolo Valli (familiar from A Fistful of Dynamite; God is always nearby) and later Leslie French about becoming a senator for the new regime. Delon and Cardinale regularly escape the crowds to further their romance. Throughout Lancaster's princess Rina Morelli knows the score but cannot hide her jealousy at his mistress, the ball and her irrelevancy since producing a next generation that will not inherit.
The tone is more upbeat than elegiac; it's more about surviving and even thriving than mourning what is being lost. It's somewhat adjacent to The Godfather — that palazzo could be the same one as Pacino resides in during his exile in Sicily — with politics brought to the forefront. The themes are also threads in Sergio Leone's movies: the big set piece in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly where Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach encounter the Union and Confederacy at a stalemate over a bridge. I guess how nationalism is forged and peace established after a revolution is still a live concern.
Roger Ebert: a "great movie" in 2003 for an instant four stars. Bosley Crowther saw a bowdlerised version cut to 2h40m and dubbed into English. The horror. "I just wonder how much Americans will know or care about what's going on, how much we will yield to a nostalgia very similar to that in Gone With the Wind." Vincent Canby got to see it in its full glory in 1983. "This may or may not be [Lancaster's] greatest performance — there's no way of telling without the voice — but it's a visually arresting one, and one that points the way to the great performances later in his career." Philip French in 2010. Five stars from Peter Bradshaw in 2003. IMDB trivia: Scorcese's favourite movie? No wonder it reminded me of The Age of Innocence. Many great lines.
