Director: Luchino Visconti
Writers: Luchino Visconti, Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Vasco Pratolini, Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, Enrico Medioli, Giovanni Testori
Photography: Giuseppe Rotunno
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Mario Serandrei
Cast: Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot, Spyros Fokas, Max Cartier, Rocco Vidolazzi, Katina Paxinou, Roger Hanin, Paulo Stoppa, Claudia Cardinale, Corrado Pani, Claudia Mori, Suzi Delair
Rocco and His Brothers is classified as an “epic melodrama” on Wikipedia, which I suspect is as much about its length as it is about, say, Nina Rota’s shimmering if too occasional score. The movie is BIG by design. The story is about the migration of a family of peasants, the Parondis, one mother and five brothers, from rural southern Italy to the modern urban environs of Milan. The family patriarch has died and the farm no longer supported the family anyway. The results are predictable at a high level, but Rocco and His Brothers is more about the details, which are often surprising. (See La Notte for more on modern Milan. See The Grapes of Wrath on migration.) There are five brothers and each gets a section of the movie: Vicenzo (Spyros Fokas), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and even little Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), though that is more by way of a coda to the picture.
The main conflict here, a towering and epic one, is between Simone and Rocco, egged on by a bad woman with a good heart, Nadia (Annie Girardot with the most sparkling, riveting performance in the whole thing). On arrival in Milan, Simone quickly finds himself with a promising boxing career, which immediately goes to his head. This is also a boxing movie, I should say, and of course mandatory for aficionados of boxing movies. Simone’s thoroughgoing rottenness is a main theme here—you think he’s bad, but he only gets worse. He wins bouts and swaggers around with a lot of cash and an eye for the babes. He’s reluctant to do anything to help the family. He’s selfish. But he falls hard for Nadia, whose biography is practically shocking. I mean, it seemed sufficiently lurid to me. They don’t call this an epic melodrama for any old reason.
Rocco and His Brothers is classified as an “epic melodrama” on Wikipedia, which I suspect is as much about its length as it is about, say, Nina Rota’s shimmering if too occasional score. The movie is BIG by design. The story is about the migration of a family of peasants, the Parondis, one mother and five brothers, from rural southern Italy to the modern urban environs of Milan. The family patriarch has died and the farm no longer supported the family anyway. The results are predictable at a high level, but Rocco and His Brothers is more about the details, which are often surprising. (See La Notte for more on modern Milan. See The Grapes of Wrath on migration.) There are five brothers and each gets a section of the movie: Vicenzo (Spyros Fokas), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and even little Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), though that is more by way of a coda to the picture.
The main conflict here, a towering and epic one, is between Simone and Rocco, egged on by a bad woman with a good heart, Nadia (Annie Girardot with the most sparkling, riveting performance in the whole thing). On arrival in Milan, Simone quickly finds himself with a promising boxing career, which immediately goes to his head. This is also a boxing movie, I should say, and of course mandatory for aficionados of boxing movies. Simone’s thoroughgoing rottenness is a main theme here—you think he’s bad, but he only gets worse. He wins bouts and swaggers around with a lot of cash and an eye for the babes. He’s reluctant to do anything to help the family. He’s selfish. But he falls hard for Nadia, whose biography is practically shocking. I mean, it seemed sufficiently lurid to me. They don’t call this an epic melodrama for any old reason.
Nadia is the underage neighbor in their building who, we come to learn, started tricking at 13. Whenever her father catches her at it he beats her, and that’s how we, and Simone, meet her: on the run from her father and looking for a place to hide. She’s young—not as young as Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, but similarly worldly, sophisticated, at ease with the world as it is. Simone sees her as a kind of vision of modern paradise objectified, a signal that he has arrived, where the living’s easy and everything is available. He seduces Rocco’s boss at the laundry shop and steals her jewelry to give to Nadia, who knows immediately he must have stolen it. But that’s the way Simone is—heedless of anything but his own desires.
Simone does not take his boxing career seriously because it came too easy for him at first, or maybe just because he’s of low character. In a somewhat unlikely turn of events but never mind, Rocco turns up at Simone’s gym as a sparring partner for the money. The managers and agents that run the place see Rocco has potential. For the sake of the story I went along with that, but Alain Delon is improbable as a boxer, with the physique more of a long-distance runner. At any rate, his career as a boxer starts to take off and then he embarks on an affair with Nadia, which somehow is not creepy given that she’s Simone’s ex. Delon plays Rocco with a wide-eyed innocence, continually disappointed, which he manages particularly well to put this over. Rocco and Nadia seem like they might have a chance.
However, Simone can’t stand these developments—as a boxer he’s more of a palooka at this point—and intercedes with a grotesque scene of sexual assault that is hard to take still even more than 60 years later. Content warnings. The values then go sideways for me—is that as intended? The rural southern Italian mindset? Because now Rocco thinks he should give up Nadia for Simone, because Simone needs her more. To her credit, Nadia at least knows this is insane and wants no part of Simone. Predictable results follow in the last hour as the picture detonates with moments of narrative high opera.
It’s a pretty good time overall, immersive and resolved in variously good ways. The boxing aspects had some interest too, notably in their influence on Martin Scorsese for Raging Bull—for example, the positions of the camera in relation to the boxing ring as fights proceed. Maybe some aspects of lighting. But for me, whether it’s the old-world ways of rural southern Italians or director Luchino Visconti and his prodigious team of writers or some collaboration between, I struggled with much of Nadia’s treatment, none of which she deserved. Maybe that’s the point but also give me a break. Nadia is where I felt the most palpable sense of the benightedness of the old ways, which are as active as ever in the world today. Visconti’s most highly regarded movie, The Leopard, was a few years away, and in a sumptuous color that matches the swirling way he approaches his ambitious storytelling. Rocco and His Brothers, as purple and sweltering as it can be, is a worthy forerunner.
Simone does not take his boxing career seriously because it came too easy for him at first, or maybe just because he’s of low character. In a somewhat unlikely turn of events but never mind, Rocco turns up at Simone’s gym as a sparring partner for the money. The managers and agents that run the place see Rocco has potential. For the sake of the story I went along with that, but Alain Delon is improbable as a boxer, with the physique more of a long-distance runner. At any rate, his career as a boxer starts to take off and then he embarks on an affair with Nadia, which somehow is not creepy given that she’s Simone’s ex. Delon plays Rocco with a wide-eyed innocence, continually disappointed, which he manages particularly well to put this over. Rocco and Nadia seem like they might have a chance.
However, Simone can’t stand these developments—as a boxer he’s more of a palooka at this point—and intercedes with a grotesque scene of sexual assault that is hard to take still even more than 60 years later. Content warnings. The values then go sideways for me—is that as intended? The rural southern Italian mindset? Because now Rocco thinks he should give up Nadia for Simone, because Simone needs her more. To her credit, Nadia at least knows this is insane and wants no part of Simone. Predictable results follow in the last hour as the picture detonates with moments of narrative high opera.
It’s a pretty good time overall, immersive and resolved in variously good ways. The boxing aspects had some interest too, notably in their influence on Martin Scorsese for Raging Bull—for example, the positions of the camera in relation to the boxing ring as fights proceed. Maybe some aspects of lighting. But for me, whether it’s the old-world ways of rural southern Italians or director Luchino Visconti and his prodigious team of writers or some collaboration between, I struggled with much of Nadia’s treatment, none of which she deserved. Maybe that’s the point but also give me a break. Nadia is where I felt the most palpable sense of the benightedness of the old ways, which are as active as ever in the world today. Visconti’s most highly regarded movie, The Leopard, was a few years away, and in a sumptuous color that matches the swirling way he approaches his ambitious storytelling. Rocco and His Brothers, as purple and sweltering as it can be, is a worthy forerunner.
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