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BURT LANCASTER opens Friday, July 19 at Film Forum

(1963, Luchino Visconti) “If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change.” Sicily, 1860: as a light breeze disturbs the curtains, an aristocrat leads his family in prayer in a stately palazzo – then a dead soldier is found in the garden. Garibaldi and the Risorgimento have come. In one of the screen’s greatest performances, Burt Lancaster as a the Prince of Salina reluctantly sees his beloved nephew Alain Delon off to join the rebels at the Battle of Palermo, then makes his peace with the changing times, marrying Delon to daughter-of-the-people Claudia Cardinale. Visconti’s spectacular adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s international bestseller is one of the cinema’s greatest evocations of the past, achingly depicting the passing of an ancient order, with a final stinging sense of an idealistic cause betrayed. (A passing the creators felt deeply: the novelist was Prince of Lampedusa and based his hero on his great-grandfather; lifelong Marxist Visconti was also the Duke of Modrone.) The climactic 45-minute ball sequence is a tour-de-force. DCP. Approx. 205 min.

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