The Leopard (1963)
Directed by Luchino Visconti
As Garibaldi's troops begin the unification of Italy in the 1860s, an aristocratic Sicilian family grudgingly adapts to the sweeping social changes undermining their way of life.
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What critics compared The Leopard to
The opening act of Luca Guadagnino's film establishes the stature of the Recchi family as surely as the Corleones are established in “ The Godfather ,” or the Salinas in Visconti's “ The Leopard .”
A glorious epic that feels a little bit like Luchino Visconti 's The Leopard by way of Paul Thomas Anderson 's Magnolia , I Am Love is a truly great film that offers substance at the heart of the season's spectacle.
However, it really is the cinema of Luchino Visconti that is most recognisable as one of Guadagnino’s influences, especially The Leopard .
He's also clearly inspired by such classic meditations on the Italian bourgeoisie and passing of epochs as "The Leopard" and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis."
It seems impossible to avoid comparing I Am Love to Lucino Visconti's The Leopard , even though the two films have very little in common besides a wealthy old family being destroyed by personal crises; yet while that film carefully frames its melodrama in a wide-ranging historical context, I Am Love makes no pretensions to context or society, despite its very deliberate chronological placement.
Visconti is more to the point, since I Am Love inescapably recalls The Leopard (1963) set in modern times.
For film fans, Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and Luchino Visconti's The Leopard will immediately come to mind as visual and overall aesthetic references, but the film shares much more in common with the works of the aforementioned Malick, whose most recent work The New World similarly purported to document a bygone era via atmosphere and emotion rather than historical accuracy.
And the director’s filmic references — whether it’s The Leopard, The Four Feathers, The Charge of the Light Brigade, or Barry Lyndon — are all to movies about hierarchies and the ways an established social order preserves and propagates itself.
The sequence feels like one unbroken shot, and has the same elegance as Visconti's long single take as he follows the prince through the ballrooms in " The Leopard ."
The ball scenes are masterfully handled in the manner of Visconti’s THE LEOPARD, and one sublime moment finds the crowd vanishing as Darcy and Elizabeth discover one another.
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He also saw a chance to make an American movie in the tradition of Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963), Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and Once Upon a Time in America (1984): a bloody, wide-screen epic that mixes elemental stories of love and revenge with a vision of the larger historical forces that shaped the capitalist society we know today.
Scorsese’s and Zaillian’s work must be measured by the storytelling form and length of The Leopard (1963), and of the ’60s roadshow epics like Spartacus (1960) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), but with the intimacy and political acumen of Stroheim, especially what we know of Greed (1924), and most profoundly of all, the overwhelming sadness of the movie’s greatest influence, Barry Lyndon (1975).
“The Irishman” lavishes the leisurely tempo and generous duration of epics like Luchino Visconti’s “The Leopard.”
Just when we think that Cimino has grasped the lessons of Visconti and The Leopard, he shows how shallow he really is.
Luchino Visconti's influence, vis a vis his 1963 film "The Leopard," is apparent in Coppola's staging of social scenes like the wedding that serves to introduce the audience to the insular world of the Corleone family.
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Like The Godfather, Heaven's Gate, now re-released in the director's cut, is deeply influenced in its stately pace and its extended sequences by Luchino Visconti's Marxist masterwork The Leopard and unfolds in three parts.