Technically, The Leopard is on

FXM Retro is running The Leopard today, although by the time you read this post, you'll likely have missed it. However, the same showing is going to be on tomorrow morning at 7:40 AM.

Burt Lancaster plays Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, leader of a noble family in Sicily in 1860. If you don't remember your history, this was just before Italy became a unified nation again, and it was an era of war between the various constituent states and even civil war, which has come to Sicily as well. The prince's family pretty much supports the old order or at least wants their life of luxury to continue as it has without disruption, although his nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) supports unification, and the Prince more or less realizes his time is up.

The Prince and his family go to their summer residence , whereupon he gets involved with the local bigwig's daughter (Claudia Cardinale), whom the bigwig is trying to marry into high society. Tancredi is in love with her too, which is just one more piece of evidence for the Prince of how society is changing and he's not going to be a part of the new society. The movie goes on and on like this for over two and a half hours. It's an extremely slow movie.

I say two and a half hours vaguely because there are actually two versions of the movie. Italian director Luchino Visconti filmed it in Italy with the international cast, making an Italian-language version (with Lancaster's dialog dubbed) that ran a little over three hours. However, Fox had picked it up for distribution in America (I'm assuming for reasons having to do with the Cleopatra money sink), and released a version that was about 25 minutes shorter, and dubbed in English, with Lancaster providing his own dialogue here. As best I could tell Lancaster must have been delivering his dialog on set in English, as it looks as though his dialogue matches his lips. I'm not a very good lip reader, but everybody else's dialog was badly off.

In addition to the dubbing and the cuts, there was also the problem for me that the FXM print is both letterboxed and pillarboxed. I think it's in the proper aspect ratio, but if you have a small TV, beware that the image is going to look really tiny. That having been said, the image looks like it would be pretty darn good on the big screen

Criterion released this one to DVD and Blu-Ray, with their edition both Visconti's 185-minute version (there were earlier longer versions although Visconti supposedly preferred the 185-minute version) and the dubbed American release. Of course, being Criterion, it's quite pricey.