Critics reviews

Many critics at the time were perplexed by the sight of the macho Lancaster playing an aging Sicilian nobleman, but this remains his greatest performance (despite the fact that he’s dubbed into Italian). The actor’s athletic grace somehow translates into the ideal embodiment of a reserved, conflicted patriarch at odds with his times.

...This sensitivity sees its apotheosis in the ball sequence. Whereas the book is comprised of even episodes, Visconti presents a lopsided work: minor moments are compressed and elided while the closing ball is extended and stretched out into its own universe. Time becomes palpable. The ritual of a dance, costuming and movement, when contrasted with a netherworld downtime, sharpen prescribed behaviour into stylised performance and spectacle.

[Visconti's] exquisite mise-en-scene (aided here by voluptuous Technirama, Technicolor's in-house version of CinemaScope) never fails to suggest living, breathing worlds; and his fluid camerawork, a major influence on both Michael Cimino and Olivier Assayas, creates the unique, sweet-and-sour flavor of nostalgia seen at an impossible distance.

The ballroom sequence that concludes The Leopard is one of the loveliest and most arbitrary sequences in film history, lovely largely because it is arbitrary. Wholly unmotivated by the dictates of the action, it detaches itself from the body of the film, which comes to seem simply a prelude.

Visconti's conception is impressive even without the breadth of Lampedusa's symbolic tapestry. Visconti, the shrewd Marxist-aristocrat, the exquisite decorator, lacks that final spark of the mystic so necessary to a unified vision of life. On screen The Leopard is an admirable film of parts, fully revealing the virtues and limitations of its director. What for Lampedusa is an expression of vanity of vanities is reduced by Visconti to the more familiar dimensions of a victory of reactionaries.