I know the title sounds a little like The Lady, or the Tiger, but it can’t be helped. Claudia Cardinale passed away recently, and we must sit shiva.

Hollywood had a bit of a thing for Italian actresses back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Claudia included. Of course the SS Sophia Loren sailed way past the Mercator line between a regular person and an Earth Mother, and was bigger than the Beatles back then. In the land of sex bombs, she’ll always be the MOAB. Gina Lollobrigida was in a bunch of movies made in English around the same time, and was about as hubba hubba as female humans get. To wit:

If you’ve never seen Woman of Straw, you’re missing out. Gina wanders around the movie in a slip for the most part. It’s one of the few good movies that Sean Connery ever made, too. The fellow could act, if you asked him to. He didn’t get asked very often, I gather. Just hired to stand around and be Sean Connery.

Back to the topic at hand. There was a land rush of Italian women in the cinema back in the day. Anouk Aimee, Virna Lisi,  Silvana Mangano, Elsa Martinelli. They all drifted back and forth between American cinema and European productions. If you don’t mind reading while looking at things, the Italian cinema has a lot of very fine movies with any or all of them in them.

Claudia Cardinale wasn’t in that many American productions. Many people remember her from Once Upon a Time in the West. It’s kind of a cult film at this point, but if you’re being honest, it’s borderline terrible. A somewhat more obscure western she made was The Professionals, which was a better movie in every which way, with a more interesting cast, and unlike OUATITW, it wasn’t a flop at the (American) box office. Lee Marvin’s kinda awesome in it, doing his Lee Marvin thing, while Claudia was certainly delivering her thing:

Claudia maybe didn’t get her, um, face on the American Mount Rushmore of cinematic Ragazzas fra Diavolo. But it was only because she didn’t care that much about American cinema. She went home to Italy and made movies in French and Italian and was happier doing it. Won plenty of awards, too.

So let’s talk about one of those Italian movies, one that is way more than just a costume drama, although that’s how it’s often described. Il Gattopardo is inexpertly translated into English as The Leopard. The gattopardo is a mythical bobcat that shows up on heraldry and in legends in Sicily. A gattopardo is often mis-identified as a serval, which looks like a miniature cheetah, or a very big housecat, but they’re not native to Sicily. But that’s part of the appeal of the title of the movie, and the award-winning book it’s based on. The man, The Leopard, is Burt Lancaster playing a Sicilian prince, and he embodies a kind of mythic duality. Not exactly of his time, part of a chain of minor royalty that outlasts regular history — an enigma adrift on a sea of current events.

In many ways, The Leopard is a mess. All the actors talk whatever language they’re comfortable in, and then Italian is dubbed over them, and inexpertly to boot. But if you forego trying to ingest whoever’s butchering everyone’s dialog, and just read the subtitles, the movie is wonderful. And it has a lot to say to Americans, if they’re paying attention. Here’s a very trenchant scene:

There’s Claudia dancing with Alain Delon, playing the Leopard’s nephew, and next in line to take his place. Cardinale looks like an Italian version of Natalie Wood at that age, and by Italian version, I mean taking it up a notch. She’s portraying Angelica Sedara, the daughter of a lowbrow local merchant and politician. He seems like a clown at first, but quickly becomes a mover and shaker when society shifts gears.

Here’s where an American watching the movie can profit by understanding the forces at play in the 1860s in what is now Italy. The southern half of today’s Italy wasn’t Italy. It was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Naples and Sicily joined together. It’s funny, but Claudia Cardinale was the perfect actress to play Angelica, and not just because she looks like an angel. She’s Sicilian, and never spoke a word of Italian until she was in her first movie, just French and Sicilian, which is similar to Italian but not identical.

The kingdom was ruled by a Bourbon, Ferdinand II. If you’ve got an afternoon to spare, you could hunt down Ferdie’s family tree, which encompasses more royal houses than I’d like to paint. For example, his sister was, get this, Empress of Brazil. I’d never heard of such a thing, and I thought I’d heard of everything.

Both the American Civil War and the Italian Risorgimento (the unification), were fought on a north/south divide, and by the same sorts of people. Both southern Italy and the Confederacy were agrarian, feudal, socially stratified, and with a long tradition of cavalier notions of honor and virtue. The north of both countries were nationalistic, industrial, commercial, financialized, and had a lot more avenues for upward (and downward) mobility.

Both wars were fought over unification, or reunification if you want to be pedantic about the Civil War. The north of both countries were going to be the arbiters of what it meant to be a nation, and they weren’t just asking the southern half to go along with their ideas. Over such fundamental ideas wars are fought.

To continue the comparison, you might remember that the stratified, inbred society of the South in the US also produced their share of haughty, childish girls ready to swing from the chandeliers, as Burt observed of the Italian versions.

So the Leopard’s nephew hooks up with the Garibaldians who conquered the southern portion of what’s now Italy, and he hooks up with Claudia, too. She starts out as Not Quite Our Class of People, Dear, but ends up the true belle of the ball, and married to a captain in the freshly minted cockpit of a new Italy. Like Rhett Butler, Alain Delon can see which way the wind is blowing, and goes with it.

In his way, so does the Leopard. Before fading away, he surprises most everyone with his support for his nephew’s marriage to the girl next door instead of some sort of imbecilic contessa, dances with her in front of that gigantic crowd to prove it, and so welcomes her into the rarified air of aristocracy. He knew a little fresh blood is what a lot of hidebound societies need from time to time.

And if there’s ever been any fresher blood onscreen than Claudia Cardinale in 1963, I haven’t seen it.

R.I.P.