The Leopard

Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 1963, after a long and difficult production at Titanus. The 205-minute Italian original was butchered to 161 minutes for international release with English-dubbed dialogue; the original was restored only in 1983 by Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation. Adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's posthumous 1958 novel (a book the author finished as he was dying) the film is one of the great achievements of Italian historical cinema.

Don Fabrizio, the Sicilian Prince of Salina (Burt Lancaster, dubbed by an Italian actor in the Italian release, in his own voice in the international cut), watches the world he was born into slip away as Garibaldi's revolution transforms Italy in the 1860s. His charismatic nephew Tancredi (Alain Delon) declares for the new regime, marries the daughter of a rising provincial bourgeois (Claudia Cardinale, the most beautiful image in 1960s European cinema), and the film closes with the famous forty-minute ball sequence at the Palazzo Gangi in Palermo (a near-real-time waltz that is among the most extraordinary sustained sequences ever filmed.

Lampedusa's most-quoted line) Everything must change so that everything can stay the same, is the film's central thesis. Visconti, born a Milanese count, understood the aristocratic register from inside; the film is unsentimental about the class it depicts, but it never patronises.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: One of the great historical epics ever filmed, and Visconti's masterpiece. The Palermo ball sequence alone is part of the canonical history of the medium.