Join, Fred White, our IAH resident film expert and critic to discuss The Leopard.

Based on the great Italian novel and best-seller since World War II, Il Gattopardo, by Tomasi Giuseppe, Prince of Lampedusa (1957), The Leopard (directed by Luchino Visconti in 1963) is one of Fred’s two favorite films of all time. The other being The Rules of the Game by Jean Renoir (1939).

The beauty, complexity, subtlety, and emotional power of this film repay many, many reviewings. It's the War and Peace of film. Set in Sicily during Garibaldi's Italian civil war, which ended with the unification of modern Italy in 1871, The Leopard is self-consciously the Italian Gone With the Wind, a long, lavish, epic portraying the passing away of an aristocratic order and its replacement by a bourgeois one. It's also a great love story featuring Visconti's self-conscious Italian answers to the animal magnetism of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale, two of the most gorgeous actors in the history of European film. Finally, it's the elegiac story of the mortality of all things human, personified in the fate of "The Leopard" himself, the Prince of Salina, a version of Lampedusa's own ancestor, superbly embodied by Burt Lancaster in one of the greatest performances in film history. Unmissable, as the Brits would say. 

Join us for what promises to be a lively and memorable discussion. 

7-7:30pm social, discussion to follow. 

About Fred White and his passion for movies: “I've been a movie buff since I was eight or so and used to ride my bike to our neighborhood theater in Atlanta on Saturday, staying there from noon to 6PM, to watch a double feature, with a news reel, a couple of weekly "serials," and some other "shorts." As an adult, I was lucky enough to be able to teach film, as well as literature, for forty years in Baltimore at Goucher College. For example, for years I taught a course on the films of Stanley Kubrick and their literary sources. I team-taught an interdisciplinary honors course with a Japanese history professor called "Japan in Film," a survey of Japanese history from the 1930s to the 1990s using nothing but Japanese films as texts. And when I taught composition classes, I had the students view, discuss, and write about the films of the Coen Brothers.