The Leopard (1963 film)

The Leopard Italian Il Gattopardo , The Serval alternate title Le Gupard is a 1963 Italian film by director Luchino Visconti, based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusas novel of the same name.

Moved by the political uprising, the Prince departs, with his priest as cover, for a nearby town where he engages in an assignation with a local woman he complains that, despite siring seven children upon his devout Catholic wife, he has yet to see her navel. Garibaldis army conquers the city and Sicily from the Bourbons, but the mood is muted and the prospects murky. The Prince muses upon the inevitability of change, with the middle class displacing the hereditary ruling class while on the surface everything remains the same. His priest worries about the future of the church under the Garibaldini, but the Prince assures him that it is only his class who has anything to lose.Refusing to bend to the tide of necessity, the Prince departs from Palermo for his summer palace at Donnafugata. The glamour of his name is still such as to lift roadblocks and allow passage to his family across disputed terrain. Arriving in the hilltop town, the Prince establishes his life just as it was always livedhunting, social visits, etc.despite the fact that a new national assembly has called a plebiscite which thanks to the corrupt zealotry of the towns leading citizen, the incorrigibly bourgeois Don Calogero Sedara, the nationalists win 5120. Sedaras grip on power and property in the region is matched only by his fawning sycophancy toward the Prince, whose incontestable nobility of character and ancestry leave Sedara looking distinctly plebeian. ........

Source: Wikipedia