THE final stages of Lancaster’s acting career becomes even more interesting for film culture audiences because these late roles consistently explore and come to terms with the inevitable process of aging, along with other social changes. Apart from that, there are still other vital roles of his demonstrating the cultivation of mental sanity and strength via studious solitude, as in his famous role as a unique prison inmate in John Frankenheimer’s ‘THE BIRDMAN OF ALCATRAZ’ of 1962.

Italian period
Synonymous with this sort of exploration in Lancaster’s mature years was his move to Italy in 1963, where he worked twice under the incomparable and profound Italian director, Luchino Visconti, first in ‘THE LEOPARD’ (1963), and ‘CONVERSATION PIECE’ (1975).
Lancaster’s move to Italy (and subsequent work with outstanding younger actors like Italy’s Claudia Cardinale, and France’s Alain Delon) was a typical expression of foresight in evaluating the decline of American/Hollywood filmmaking from the ‘60s onward, due to an increasing commercial attitude of equating films (indeed art in general) with disposable ‘pastime entertainment’, especially with a eye towards a young emerging generation who seemed susceptible to entertainment trends of the moment, not values of enduring human scope.
Lancaster, with his professional knowledge and seriousness, no doubt saw where European cinema, particularly Italian, French, Spanish, Swedish and Polish (mostly only ‘60s British) would become the best cinematic products of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, precisely because it refused to adjust to a specific audience or market, based on contemporary youth or a time period. Rather, such European films maintained a perennial interest in the entire human process of birth, learning, knowledge, experience, imagination, creativity, world travel, discovery, love, and aging.

‘The Leopard’
In Visconti’s ‘The Leopard’’, based on the amazing and stylistically written novel of the same title by the highly artistic Sicilian nobleman-of-letters, Tomasi de Lampedusa (a novel repeatedly rejected by Italy’s leading publishers right up to the author’s death in Rome in 1957 only to emerge as post-war Italy’s most popular and studied novel after its eventual acceptance in 1958 by the Feltrinelli Publishing House in Milan),  Lancaster is perfect as the charismatic late 19th Century Prince Fabricio Salina, who, as ruler over huge estates and hundreds of people, remains socially ordinary, approachable, considerate, and frankly uninhibited.
‘The Leopard’ is both a literary and cinematic masterpiece, the latter considerably helped by the youthful supporting roles of Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon to Lancaster’s aging role of nobility. Returning under Visconti’s direction again in 1975’s ‘Conversation Piece’, Lancaster is an aging professor in Rome who rents and shares part of his decaying mansion with the shockingly wild and uninhibited young adult children of a permissive Silvana Mangano.
But the film, like the best of European modernist art, sides neither with Lancaster as the fussy aging professor, or the behaviour of the young new generation; rather, it reveals the necessary conversation or dialogue, the give-and-take of what each has to offer between themselves. It could be this intellectual yet sensual combination which made ‘Conversation Piece’ a commercial failure in the USA, while a huge success in Europe.

‘The Swimmer’
Lancaster, of course, could not deny his love for action films of his past, and in 1966, he returned under Richard Brooks’ direction to make the well-casted, rollicking ‘THE PROFESSIONALS’, costarring Claudia Cardinale. But it is in 1968, at the height of the North American Counter-Culture’s vibrant critical position, in all the Arts, towards American competitive materialist Capitalist values that Lancaster found the role in ‘The Swimmer’, which charts the process of a jaded charisma and psychological breakdown of a man whose refusal to give up belief in his false Utopia of an American bourgeois lifestyle ends up as a devastated mental wreck, believing his own social lie.
‘The Swimmer’ is one of those unique American films of the 1960s — like ‘THE GRADUATE’, ‘MIDNIGHT COWBOY’, ‘THE MISFITS’, ‘EASY RIDER’, ‘WEST SIDE STORY, among others —  that is a masterpiece from start to finish.
Smartly directed by Frank Perry, it was adapted 90% from an outstanding short-story, in form and content, by John Cheever, definitely one of the best 20th Century American modern short-story writers.
The film gave Lancaster a chance to display balance of his physical and mental acting charisma in one of his best roles, clad only in bathing trunks throughout — once even naked — like a primitive in an allegorical tale of lost Eden and lost innocence. He decides to absurdly swim back to his suburban house across his affluent suburban neighbourhood private pools, only to confront his own illusion at the film’s powerful emotional climax.
In one scene, Lancaster races a black stallion, giving us evidence of his sustained athletic prowess, as in ‘THE KENTUCKIAN’ of 1955, when, in one scene, he runs across a creek and overcomes an adversary before he can reload his flint-lock rifle.

‘Atlantic City’
Lancaster’s great last comeback role, in brilliant modernist reference to both his past charismatic screen fame, and the theme of a dignified, young-at-heart aging, occurred with 1981’s ‘ATLANTIC CITY’, directed by Louis Malle.
Burt’s moving performance as a ‘kept’ man by a rich ‘old flame’ he looks after, and his lucky re-run as a well-dressed gigolo who saves young Susan Sarandon — in one of her most beautiful and perfect roles —  from  devious connections made ‘Atlantic City’ a landmark 1980s Hollywood film classic.
The entire film’s background of a declining neighbourhood, and the squalid drug-induced folly of a few anomalous leftover hippies was conducive to Lancaster’s role with its stylish gentlemanly charisma nurtured decades ago by earlier classic cinema. In addition, the loose, wacky roles of two stylishly talented Canadian actors, Al Waxman and the innovative TV producer, Moses Znaimer, added to the all-round excellence of ‘Atlantic City’.
It all seems a preliminary to the exciting post-modernist quoted roles of Lancaster and Kirk Douglas in ‘TOUGH GUYS’ of 1986. Once again these two great actors of classic Hollywood came back to thrill us like they always did. Burt Lancaster’s cinematic career established charisma as an indispensable value in cinema’s future.