The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) <br></br>Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of [P.]

This is where Scorsese and Coppola learnt their tricks

The BFI's re-release of Visconti's 1963 epic The Leopard carries a poster blurb truly to be reckoned with: "One of the films I live by," says Martin Scorsese. The sprawling fresco of a ball sequence that comprises most of the film's final hour provided a blueprint for Scorsese's swooningly fastidious The Age of Innocence, and for the wedding of Coppola's The Godfather too. The Leopard is the film that, more than any other foreign language production bar Seven Samurai, fuelled the grandest ambitions among America's 1970s movie-brat generation.

But watching The Leopard now, in its restored 185-minute version, you sense how much of Hollywood there already is in Visconti's conception. In its first hour, this is very much a landscape epic: the Salina family's Sicilian palazzo is locked in the hills like a Mexican fort in a Western; when the family travels to its summer residence, the widescreen composition of mountains has the desolate vastness of John Ford's Monument Valley. As historical costume drama on the grandest scale, The Leopard is a classic example – and I do mean "classic" in the true sense – of a kind of cinema that has hugely fallen out of fashion. It is easy to be blinded by the extravagance of its waltzes and whiskers, and to dismiss it as a formal exercise in romantic nostalgia, Gone With the Wind Italian-style (indeed, Visconti's 1860s aristocratic Sicily is just as distant and as doomed as that film's ante-bellum South). But The Leopard is also a hard-headed statement about political realities, which is why you may want to quickly bone up on Italian history before you watch it.

Based on the novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, himself a Sicilian aristocrat, the film begins at a decisive moment of the Risorgimento, as Garibaldi's army arrives to claim Sicily for a unified Italy. The worldly-wise Prince Fabrizio (Burt Lancaster), head of the house of Salina, watches as his swashbuckling nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) rides off to join the Garibaldi revolution, as many aristocrats did. By the end of the film, however, Tancredi has renounced the cause and become a complacent royalist. As Italy's social make-up is transformed forever, Fabrizio – who has pragmatically brokered Tancredi a marriage with Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), the daughter of an ambitious bourgeois – watches history work its changes, fully conscious of the compromises entailed.

The Leopard, however, is anything but a dry thesis on social change. Visconti articulates his arguments in a visual and dramatic language of breathtaking opulence. The battle scenes are choreographed with spectacular strategic precision, and so indeed is the ball, shot in a Palermo villa over 36 days, and requiring 120 make-up, hair and costume staff, 15 florists, and 100 red roses daily, shipped from Rome. This is just anecdotal dazzle: the point is what all this splendour signifies. Filtered through the pained consciousness of the magnificently aloof Fabrizio, the ball becomes a tableau of time's passing, the awareness of death, the abandonment of passionately-held values. The sequence is visually orchestrated on a symphonic scale: with cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno's Technicolor restored to its proper vividness, watch how the blue and yellow sashes of the militia cut through the dancing crowd like a musical leitmotif.

Lampedusa's story is a Götterdämmerung of the nobility, about to succumb to the inertia that Fabrizio diagnoses as the Sicilian malaise. If the film sometimes seems static, that is because Visconti works that inertia into a visual theme: we see the family stiffly gathered at Mass like an arrangement of devout waxworks, or sitting in church, covered in dust from the road, as if calcified into statues. That dust is also a token of the film's extraordinary physicality, a quality usually occulted by the aesthetics of costume drama: Visconti gives us a ball sequence in which the guests visibly sweat. There's a real sense of smell to the film, an urgency of the flesh embodied above all by Claudia Cardinale's raucous beauty; her Angelica is an almost too lush flower of the Sicilian soil, bound to disrupt the staid in-laws who think they can cultivate her.

Burt Lancaster began his alternative career as a monolith of European art cinema here, playing the scowling, centaur-like patriarch. Visconti was uncertain about casting an American star, but Lancaster's serene muscularity was ideal for the role. Seeing Lancaster now you think, they don't make them like that any more – which is just the point, for Don Fabrizio is the last of his race, all the more magnificent because he calmly theorises his own obsolescence. Visconti, the aristocrat turned Marxist, was bidding an ambivalent farewell to failed revolutionary dreams and to an ancien régime that had to die, however nostalgic he felt for it. Seen today, The Leopard has become not just a requiem for the old Italy, but also for a long-vanished European cinema of surpassing ambition and mastery.

Despite the title, the German documentary Thomas Pynchon: A Journey into the Mind of P. doesn't take us remotely near the psyche of its subject, an American novelist and recluse. Nor does it get particularly close to his writing. The film is less a serious inquiry into the Pynchon legend than an excuse for assorted fans and old acquaintances to speculate wildly about the Howard Hughes of postmodernism. Might he once have taken the same bus as Lee Harvey Oswald? Did he ever visit bookshops in drag? Does he hide from cameras because he's sensitive about his teeth? The only real illumination is George Plimpton's appraisal of the erudite author as "the sort of person who could turn out an almanac in a week". As for any sense of the imagination that informs V or Mason & Dixon, forget it. Instead we get a pot-pourri of archive footage, bolstering whimsical cod-paranoid fantasies about secret history. It's a clever idea to use music by The Residents, since the masked US experimentalists are the Pynchons of avant-pop; but it makes for a gratingly ugly 90 minutes' listening.

When Pynchon is finally captured on camera (or is he?) he proves to be a grouchy old guy in a baseball cap. But even if he'd looked like Liberace, the books wouldn't read any differently. The whole film is uninformative and fairly futile; you'd be better off having another crack at Gravity's Rainbow.

j.romney@independent.co.uk