The Leopard--A Great Film, A Great Adaptation

The tendency in adapting novels (as well as true stories) is to make them more cinematic and more audience-pleasing. One fairly typical example is Barry Levinson's 1984 film version of Bernard Malamud's baseball novel The Natural.

It was financially successful, critically well-received, and is well regarded by both baseball fans and those who do not follow the sport. But as an adaptation, it has been ridiculed by those who prize the Malamud novel. (SPOILER ALERT). The film version makes the character of Roy Hobbs sympathetic and fairly simplistic--a great young ballplayer who is robbed by fate of his chance for greatness and is provided with another chance later in life--and gives the story a happy ending--Hobbs hits a home run, winning the game, achieves baseball greatness, and settles into a happy life with his wife Iris and their son. The home run gives the film a spectacular close as the ball shatters the night game lights, showering the field with sparks as Hobbs runs the bases. The novel's Hobbs is more complex and flawed--he takes a bribe to throw the game, changes his mind, but strikes out anyway, losing his chance for greatness and happiness with Iris and their child. In movies, to paraphrase The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when there's a choice between a happy ending and a bleak one, go for happy and forget about the book. Similarly, King Vidor's film adaptation of Leon Tolstoy's War and Peace, what some would label an historical costume drama like The Leopard, ends with Natasha and Pierre walking off together, albeit stiffly, and doesn't delve into how the novel ends, with Tolstoy's suggestion in his epilogue that Pierre and Nikolai, the son of Prince Andrei, will join the 1825 Decembrist revolt by the liberals against the Tsar. In adapting a book to film, filmmakers generally opt for thinking film and not respect for the source. The legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock was asked why, rather than using as a source for his mystery/crime films short stories or obscure novels, he didn't film a great crime novel such as Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Hitchcock answered that with little-known works he was freer to make changes to exploit the cinematic aspects of the original but with a literary masterpiece he was less free. One can argue, as I and others do, that Visconti respected The Leopard and yet still translated it cinematically.

It's a true adaptation of the novel. It is also a magnificent film. The ball that ends the movie proceeds in painstaking detail, with gorgeous gowns, lavishly photographed displays of food, and lush music by Nino Rota (assisted by an unpublished waltz by Giuseppe Verdi). And all the while, Prince Salini struggles through the evening, feeling, as he says, "ill-at-ease" in both worlds. He says he has a headache. He washes his faces, looks deeply into his reflection, and cries. He walks into another room and stares at a 1778 painting by the French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze that's in a style and subject that he is unused to. The title, appropriately, is "The Father's Curse, and the Son's Punishment," for the Risorgimento will bring not only unification but, in 60 years, the dictator Benito Mussolini and world war. He returns to the ball and sits with people from what will soon be called the middle class and with whom he has nothing in common. When he walks home, he passes a priest and altar boy on their way to early morning mass, kneels out of respect, and, while kneeling, prays, saying, "O faithful star, when will you give me an appointment less ephemeral, far from all this, in your own region of perennial certitude." He rises and walks into the shadows as the film ends.

The Leopard was not a big success in the U.S., coming out in the same year as such epics as Cleopatra and How the West Was Won. But it won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, Italy's David di Donatello for best production, and the best foreign film award from the National Board of Review. It is the director Martin Scorsese's favorite film. And it is included in Steven Schneider's book 1001 Films You Must See Before You Die.

As I wrote earlier, it is not for everybody's taste. I remember an outing with my family to see Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film version of William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to which The Leopard is similar as an adaptation and in style and pace. My late brother Jim walked out and called it "Borrey Lyndon." I can imagine Jim would have a similar view of The Leopard, calling it "Lousy Leopard" or "Longey Leopard" or something.

I am not even sure The Leopard can be a favorite film of mine, one that I can dip into again and again. Time will tell. But I think it is a great one and an example of how to credibly adapt a well-known and respected book.