"The Leopard" is bested at English Box Offices the previous weekend ONLY by
the sequel of the X-Men !!!!

Perhaps this restored version of this grandly epic film will bring the appreciation it deserves. The original 1963 "The Leopard" (The American "cut" was poorly edited
and dubbed, and has given "The Leopard" a terrible reputation in the US).

After Visconti's heirs regained possession of the rights to it, they requested Cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno to edit it according to the Visconti's wishes.
The 1983 restoration of the film saw only very limited US release.

Rotunno also oversaw the Italian DVD special edition of "The Leopard" released in 2001.

None of the versions are currently available on Video or DVD in the US.
but the DVD of this current restoration IS available in England.

Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is one of the finest cinemascope films, certainly Visconti's finest period film, and arguably his masterpiece.
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[British Film Institute] THE LEOPARD:  Luchino Visconti a major celebration of the work of an extraordinary filmmaker, with a major retrospective in London and Edinburgh, theatrical releases, a tour, book, and new DVD releases
The British Film Institute  << http://www.bfi.org.uk/ >>

Wednesday 7th May 2003 Screen averages for this weekend show that the British Film Institute's re-release of The Leopard was a strong performer, coming in the top three films this week. Achieving takings of over £50,000 on 5 prints during its opening bank holiday weekend, the film was second only to the sequel of The X-Men. Third was James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss, which is also screening at the bfi's London IMAX cinema.

The restored print of Visconti's epic masterpiece opened on four screens in London and one in Cambridge on Friday 2nd May and had the most successful opening weekend of any bfi release. Screenings on Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights at the NFT were all sold out, with queues extending outside the doors. Winning 5 star reviews The Leopard is the highlight of the NFT's major Visconti retrospective and will be playing for a two week extended run.

It can also be seen in the West End and in Cambridge, and will play at selected cinemas throughout the UK in the coming weeks. The whole retrospective is also being screened simultaneously in Scotland, at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh where a two-week run of The Leopard will begin on 30th May.

This preservation and restoration is the result of The Visconti Project, sponsored by the Italian Cultural Institute and the Scuola Nazionale Di Cinema.
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Thanks to Alan Gerard Hartman of ITA-Sicily@ rootsweb.com

THE LEOPARD (Il Gattopardo)
Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of [P.]

This is where Scorsese and Coppola learnt their tricks

Independent Co. UK
By Jonathan Romney
04 May 2003

The BFI's re-release of Visconti's 1963 epic The Leopard carries a poster blurb truly to be reckoned with: "One of the films I live by," says Martin Scorsese.

The sprawling fresco of a ball sequence that comprises most of the film's final hour provided a blueprint for Scorsese's swooningly fastidious The Age of Innocence, and for the wedding of Coppola's The Godfather too.

The Leopard is the film that, more than any other foreign language production bar
Seven Samurai, fuelled the grandest ambitions among America's 1970s
movie-brat generation.

But watching The Leopard now, in its restored 185-minute version, you sense
how much of Hollywood there already is in Visconti's conception. In its first
hour, this is very much a landscape epic: the Salina family's Sicilian
palazzo is locked in the hills like a Mexican fort in a Western; when the
family travels to its summer residence, the widescreen composition of
mountains has the desolate vastness of John Ford's Monument Valley. As
historical costume drama on the grandest scale, The Leopard is a classic
example – and I do mean "classic" in the true sense – of a kind of cinema
that has hugely fallen out of fashion. It is easy to be blinded by the
extravagance of its waltzes and whiskers, and to dismiss it as a formal
exercise in romantic nostalgia, Gone With the Wind Italian-style (indeed,
Visconti's 1860s aristocratic Sicily is just as distant and as doomed as that
film's ante-bellum South). But The Leopard is also a hard-headed statement
about political realities, which is why you may want to quickly bone up on
Italian history before you watch it.

Based on the novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, himself a Sicilian aristocrat,
the film begins at a decisive moment of the Risorgimento, as Garibaldi's army
arrives to claim Sicily for a unified Italy. The worldly-wise Prince Fabrizio
(Burt Lancaster), head of the house of Salina, watches as his swashbuckling
nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) rides off to join the Garibaldi revolution, as
many aristocrats did. By the end of the film, however, Tancredi has renounced
the cause and become a complacent royalist. As Italy's social make-up is
transformed forever, Fabrizio – who has pragmatically brokered Tancredi a
marriage with Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of an ambitious
bourgeois – watches history work its changes, fully conscious of the
compromises entailed.

The Leopard, however, is anything but a dry thesis on social change. Visconti
articulates his arguments in a visual and dramatic language of breathtaking
opulence. The battle scenes are choreographed with spectacular strategic
precision, and so indeed is the ball, shot in a Palermo villa over 36 days,
and requiring 120 make-up, hair and costume staff, 15 florists, and 100 red
roses daily, shipped from Rome. This is just anecdotal dazzle: the point is
what all this splendour signifies. Filtered through the pained consciousness
of the magnificently aloof Fabrizio, the ball becomes a tableau of time's
passing, the awareness of death, the abandonment of passionately-held values.
The sequence is visually orchestrated on a symphonic scale: with
cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno's Technicolor restored to its proper
vividness, watch how the blue and yellow sashes of the militia cut through
the dancing crowd like a musical leitmotif.

Lampedusa's story is a Götterdämmerung of the nobility, about to succumb to
the inertia that Fabrizio diagnoses as the Sicilian malaise. If the film
sometimes seems static, that is because Visconti works that inertia into a
visual theme: we see the family stiffly gathered at Mass like an arrangement
of devout waxworks, or sitting in church, covered in dust from the road, as
if calcified into statues. That dust is also a token of the film's
extraordinary physicality, a quality usually occulted by the aesthetics of
costume drama: Visconti gives us a ball sequence in which the guests visibly
sweat. There's a real sense of smell to the film, an urgency of the flesh
embodied above all by Claudia Cardinale's raucous beauty; her Angelica is an
almost too lush flower of the Sicilian soil, bound to disrupt the staid
in-laws who think they can cultivate her.

Burt Lancaster began his alternative career as a monolith of European art
cinema here, playing the scowling, centaur-like patriarch. Visconti was
uncertain about casting an American star, but Lancaster's serene muscularity
was ideal for the role. Seeing Lancaster now you think, they don't make them
like that any more – which is just the point, for Don Fabrizio is the last of
his race, all the more magnificent because he calmly theorises his own
obsolescence.

Visconti, the aristocrat turned Marxist, was bidding an ambivalent farewell to failed revolutionary dreams and to an ancien régime that had to die, however nostalgic he felt for it. Seen today, The Leopard has become not just a requiem for the old Italy, but also for a long-vanished European cinema of surpassing ambition and mastery.

Despite the title, the German documentary Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the
Mind of P. doesn't take us remotely near the psyche of its subject, an
American novelist and recluse. Nor does it get particularly close to his
writing. The film is less a serious inquiry into the Pynchon legend than an
excuse for assorted fans and old acquaintances to speculate wildly about the
Howard Hughes of postmodernism. Might he once have taken the same bus as Lee
Harvey Oswald? Did he ever visit bookshops in drag? Does he hide from cameras
because he's sensitive about his teeth?

The only real illumination is George Plimpton's appraisal of the erudite author as "the sort of person who could turn out an almanac in a week". As for any sense of the imagination that informs V or Mason & Dixon, forget it. Instead we get a pot-pourri of archive footage, bolstering whimsical cod-paranoid fantasies about secret history.

It's a clever idea to use music by The Residents, since the masked US
experimentalists are the Pynchons of avant-pop; but it makes for a gratingly
ugly 90 minutes' listening.

When Pynchon is finally captured on camera (or is he?) he proves to be a
grouchy old guy in a baseball cap. But even if he'd looked like Liberace, the
books wouldn't read any differently. The whole film is uninformative and
fairly futile; you'd be better off having another crack at Gravity's Rainbow.

Enjoyment
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/reviews/story.jsp?story=403442