Cardinale’s beauty was such that it could seize audiences with a variant of Stendhal Syndrome — the condition in which too much beauty can make you faint. .
Back in the late 1980s, the venerable Public Theater on Manhattan’s Lafayette Street contained one rather nice movie emporium alongside its stage venues. A rep house, it seated maybe 300 souls and had a better-than-passably-large screen. It was there, I remember, that I saw a superb print of The Leopard, director Luchino Visconti’s 1963 epic, based on a landmark Italian novel, a tale of changing times in Sicily. Burt Lancaster headed its all-star cast. Alain Delon was the film’s more romantic male lead.
About an hour into the movie, there’s a lunch held at the house of Lancaster’s Prince. Delon’s Tancredi, a nephew of the Prince, is much coveted by the Prince’s daughter, Concetta, played by Lucilla Morlacchi. One of the local movers and shakers shows up, and there’s much mirth made, before he gets up the stairs, of the fact that he’s wearing formal frack-tails to a lunch. The buffoonish Don Calogero apologizes to the Prince; his wife could not attend the lunch, so he’s brought his daughter Angelica instead.
And so, her character looking very shy and nervous Claudia Cardinale appears. In the scene itself, the action and conversation stop; you can hear a pin drop in the on-screen room. (And it’s almost tragic the way that Concetta’s face falls.) At the Public Theater that afternoon, there was something like a collective gasp. Cardinale’s beauty in this scene, in the whole film, is such that it can seize audiences with a variant of Stendhal Syndrome — the condition in which too much beauty can make you faint.
This is arguably the most extraordinary of all of the entrances Cardinale, who died yesterday at age 87, made in her long cinematic career (indeed, it’s one of the most extraordinary entrances in all of cinema), but ultimately, almost all of her entrances were at the very least noteworthy. Check her out in a clingy fuchsia knit sweater and matching cap as she shushes down an Italian Alp in the first Pink Panther film in 1963. Here she plays Princess Dala, the rightful owner of the title jewel coveted by master thief David Niven. (As self-possessed as her character is, she can’t help but fall for Niven’s charms, to the extent that she becomes his co-conspirator against Peter Sellers’ bumbling Inspector Clouseau. It’s complicated. Watch the movie.)
Then there’s the way she shows up like an almost literal vision to beguile Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s 8 ½. It’s somewhat difficult to reckon, in today’s environment where it could be years between a single star’s vehicles, that all three of these Cardinale picture were released in the same year.
