Rocco and His Brothers (1960)

Rocco e i suoi Fratelli, Italy / France, 179 minutes

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.

"An Invitation to the Hunt" (1960)

George Hitchcock, author of the short story "An Invitation to the Hunt," is no relation to Alfred, though I discovered the story originally in one of Alfred's story collections. George is listed in Wikipedia as an actor, poet, playwright, teacher, labor activist, publisher, and painter (though not to be confused with George Hitchcock the Rhode Island artist). He was the editorial and publishing force behind Kayak, a poetry magazine based in San Francisco and then a book publisher, putting work into print by Margaret Atwood, Robert Bly, Richard Brautigan, Raymond Carver, and many others. He died in 2010 at the age of 96.

Though "An Invitation to the Hunt" has many elements of genre commercial product, it was published first in a literary magazine called the San Francisco Review, which also published Albert Camus, Cynthia Ozick, and others. (Note: much of this from internet sources.) So the story appears to come with a certain literary pedigree. This is also apparent in the quality of its language and its precision. Still, in many ways it's also typical of the rote shock twist endings popular in mystery, science fiction, and other short stories and TV shows at the time. "An Invitation to the Hunt" is now obscure. It's not online and can only be found in a few out-of-print anthologies, with titles that give you the drift: When Evil Wakes, Realms of Darkness, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories My Mother Never Told Me. That's most of what I know about this story and author.

For this piece, it's obviously necessary to give away the ending, so if that's a problem you can come on back and revisit this piece a few weeks from now or whenever you like after you read the story. I'll be here.

"The Bystander" (1960)

Read story by Gina Berriault online.

Gina Berriault's story did not impress me much, though it has an arresting last image and lines. Published in 1960, its themes and preoccupations are done better elsewhere, and more generally done to death already. In fairness, this might have felt more groundbreaking, or original, in 1960. An impoverished father is trying to eke out sustenance and raise his son, who is the first-person narrator of this very short story. Early in the story the father snaps, assaults his girlfriend (offstage), and is subsequently hauled off to a mental hospital. Yes, a mental hospital. This suggests he is insane, which means the story could go anywhere. Fortunately, it settles on making him depressed and pathetic. That's still not much but it could have been worse. The story is old enough that I suspect these details are intended to be shocking and dramatic. But they are not, particularly, and a lack of concrete specificity about the events, or anything of interest beyond that they happened, makes the story come up a little short for me. I did find others on the internet praising Berriault's ability to write the first-person narration of a man, and though I've seen worse (usually when men attempt to write as women) I wasn't convinced by it. The dynamics of the father-son relationship seemed cautiously correct, emphasis on caution over correctness, which might explain the lack of detail—perhaps too risky for credibility to go there except in vague ways. I've come to my suspicions of mental illness in fiction by degrees. For a good deal of the 20th century, following Freud's big splash, it was reasonably useful. It felt modern, with its intimations of science and bureaucracy. And we know people do go crazy, whatever exactly that means, and it's dramatic to live through for everyone involved. Fitzgerald, Plath, and Salinger, among many others, have used it more or less to good effect. But at some point—I want to blame the various changes in the concept and treatment of mental illness from the '70s and '80s—it became more rather than less of a rote device. Want to write about random strange behavior? Put your main character out of his mind. Want to underline the pathos of someone's story? Consider housing them in a mental institution. Even better, make it clearly the wrong thing to do. At least Berriault hasn't made that mistake here. It's not clear the father doesn't warrant institutionalization. Certainly he is very depressed, and we know the assault happened. But he's such a maddeningly fuzzy character, as is his son, that it's hard to get any sense at all for who he or any of them are, let alone any reason to care. I'm willing to give Berriault some benefit of the doubt, because the story appears in good company in a good collection. But I think it's one of the lesser offerings.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

See Them Die (1960)

This short novel in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain offers up a one-day tick-tock of a simmering ethnic situation and a view of the precinct as a Puerto Rican slum, or barrio. We are also given to know, very early on, that on this day "two people will die on this street." Overall, this is a pretty good book from the series, focused on police procedures of community relations and managing explosive scenes of violence. McBain is on his game with a bunch of slices of life around the barrio: the cops, the kids, the gangs, the hookers, people passing through that day. It all takes place on a very hot summer Sunday, so church is peripherally involved as well. It also features Andy Parker more prominently than usual, though the attention is ultimately spent mostly on making him a caricature, which is a little unfortunate. Steve Carella is hanging heroically around as usual. These earlier novels in the series often seemed to dwell more on precinct brass, a captain and a lieutenant. Mostly I'm impressed with the pleasure McBain seems to take in identifying and sorting out the pieces, and telling stories. It's interesting to know two people will die, it adds an element of suspense and tension as a dozen and more characters wheel by. It's a hot kind of Do the Right Thing situation he gets going pretty effectively. I was reading this as news came in of the murder of Walter Scott in South Carolina, shot in the back eight times by a policeman. There was a lag between reports of the incident and release of a video of it, so we had an unusual opportunity to see the level of deceit practiced by police now, and the brutality, both of which have no doubt existed for as long as police authority has. I was outraged, of course, but I was also struck by how much I can still feel for the cops in this fictional 87th Precinct, who seem realistic enough. There's probably even more police brutality going on than McBain allows, but he doesn't shy away from what he acknowledges of it, and See Them Die is one place where he is particularly effective. But as usual what I like best about McBain when he's got it going on, as here, are all the small observations and everyday events, working themselves out as we all try to get along. He's hit and miss with this, make no mistake. McBain is fully capable of egregious cliché. The reports of a 20th-century New York Balzac were overstated. But he's often very good in surprising ways.

In case it's not at the library.

Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (1960)

I like to think this entry in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which wasn't his real name either) started originally as an outrageously bad pun and from there McBain made up a case. It may be the first time for him but it wouldn't be the last—there's a Matthew Hope novel from 1996, for example, called Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear. Attend now closely: McBain is more heavy-handed than usual referring to the detectives of the 87th precinct squad as "the boys," awkwardly calling attention to it through repetitiveness. The case starts out with the grisly discovery of a dismembered human hand in a travel bag left at a bus stop. The fingertips have been severed to prevent fingerprint analysis. But the lab soon determines that it is the hand of a very large man, being great and big itself, and so, you see. Er, yes. There you have it. Steve Carella is our main dude, with Cotton Hawes riding shotgun. It's a pretty good procedural in terms of developing suspects and trailing down the leads. It has sailors, sob sisters, and strippers. On the personal side, an interesting conflict develops among Carella, the ever-repugnant Andy Parker, and a Puerto Rican officer. Parker is not offensively racist here—or I didn't loathe him as often, put it that way—so maybe the issue is considered sufficiently raised at this point in the series. Actually, in all my reading so far, Parker seems more a kind of cipher, not even there in many of the books. There's a little more here on Carella's wife Teddy too. This is very much of its time, with some racial awareness but less so on gender issues. Women are taken for granted as sexual objects, and chiefly judged and treated that way. It's equally important, for example, that Teddy copes with her loss of hearing well, that she looks good and has a healthy sexual appetite, that she's a capable and loving mother, and that the nanny regards her highly. The nanny, yes. Never mind. I mean, what do you expect? It's about a bad pun. It's 1960. The story is pretty good, the characters are in motion, and it's 1960.

In case it's not at the library.

The Heckler (1960)

The Heckler is an important volume in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain because it marks the first appearance of the Deaf Man. He is referred to here only as "the deaf man," but the ambition to make him a supervillain on the order of Sherlock Holmes's nemesis Professor Moriarty is already there. We know that partly because one of the detectives, Bert Kling, happens to be reading a Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Red-Headed League." That story, in turn, has explicit parallels in The Heckler, which involves a man calling two dozen owners of small businesses and threatening to kill them. After some investigation, it turns out all the businesses are adjacent to banks, jewelry stores, and other high-value targets. It's all a little complicated, an interesting if way overly busy caper scheme. Eventually it grows to ludicrous proportions, with the 87th Precinct tied up in knots with bombs, fires, and rioting mobs—an insanely imagined scene of terrorism. Our hero is Steve Carella (no Cotton Hawes in sight) and he takes some severe punishment—more grist for later developments in the series. The Heckler is a little too much in the caper mode for my taste, losing sight of its procedural moorings by the last third as it indulges an impossible level of mayhem. That's balanced a little by the Carella drama. McBain as always is a first-rate raconteur. It's a good enough read. If McBain has to go supervillain on us, I appreciate that he looks to Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes for his guideposts. It could have been Lex Luthor. "The heckler" is the term the detectives use for the threatening caller. At one point the Deaf Man uses the alias L. Sordo, for "el sordo," which is Spanish for "deaf man." That's cute. But the climax really strains credulity, involving some two dozen exploding and incendiary bombs going off in places like stadiums full of people, and other crowded places. The recent Paris attacks by comparison look more like people shooting off cap guns. I appreciate that McBain could conceive the scenario more than 50 years ago. Most people then were imagining nuclear strikes and holocausts much more than coordinated terrorist bombings. You have to give it to him on that point.

In case it's not at the library.

The Apartment (1960)

USA, 125 minutes
Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond
Photography: Joseph LaShelle
Music: Adolph Deutsch
Editor: Daniel Mandell
Cast: Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen, Joan Shawlee, Edie Adams, David Lewis, Hope Holiday

It's always struck me odd that director Billy Wilder chose to shoot Some Like it Hot in black and white, because it seems like such a natural for the vivid color treatment, especially once it gets to Florida. But I have no such problems with The Apartment. Its dreariness, even set in the heart of bustling, upscale New York City, is practically its main point—that is, right after farce. Billed as comedy, sold as comedy, often played as comedy, there's not actually much that seems funny in The Apartment, and there's probably more to it than just making adjustments for other times (which can't be entirely ruled out either). "Light-hearted" is about as far as I'm willing to go and even that is misleading.

The Apartment has a kind of half-surprising connection to It's a Wonderful Life, another peculiar comedy set during the holidays. At least, formally, they both pivot on a suicide attempt and end on a New Year's Eve bawling of "Auld Lang Syne." Jack Lemmon plays C.C. "Buddy Boy" Baxter, an accounting drone in an insurance company who lives in an apartment nearby in midtown Manhattan. Partly because he thinks it will help him get ahead, and partly because he's just a nebbish at heart, Baxter makes his apartment available to certain high-ranking players in his company for their illicit trysts. What could possibly go wrong?

L'Avventura (1960)

Italy/France, 143 minutes
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Tonino Guerra
Photography: Aldo Scarvada
Music: Giovanni Fusco
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma
Cast: Monica Vitti, Gabriele Ferzetti, Lea Massari, Dominique Blanchar, James Addams, Lelio Luttazi

The last time I looked at L'Avventura I found to my surprise that it went by lickety-split fast for a slow-moving movie nearly two and a half hours long. It struck me as lean and supple and basically in full control of its powers. Yet it's very likely that L'Avventura may be the single most disappointing movie I've ever seen, when I saw it the first time, looking forward from its length and reputation and the general contours of its storyline to something narratively engaging and instead finding what looked and felt like a puffed-up (and boring) piece of cruelly deliberate aimlessness.

It might have had something to do with the circumstances—that first look was at a VHS tape checked out from the library. I'm sure most would agree that's not the way to see Michelangelo Antonioni's widely hailed and regarded masterpiece. In fact, I haven't yet had (or anyway taken) the opportunity to see it on a big screen; the sense I get, not just from the tenor of the praise but from the way the visuals have since caught me, is that this is one that likely improves with size, and the bigger the screen and the house and the more packed you can get it, the better. Otherwise it's a little bit of a crapshoot.

Breathless (1960)

À bout de soufflé, France, 90 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Martial Solal
Editors: Cecile Decugis, Lila Herman
Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, Daniel Boulanger, Jean-Pierre Melville

I better cop to a problem with Jean-Luc Godard right up front, if only as a matter of fair warning: hidebound conventions (and spoilers) directly ahead. Godard is and remains, for me, an acknowledged blind spot, likely weighed down as much as anything by the imposing reputation that has preceded him practically since the day I first heard of him. His most widely hailed pictures—and Breathless, his feature debut, is the first among them in many ways, along with Pierrot le fou, which affects me similarly, and Contempt, which seems slightly a bit of a different animal, but all that in due time—tend to strike me as monumentally silly or academically pretentious or both, the result of children playacting with motion picture technology.

I will grant these are no ordinary children—they have levels of aesthetic sophistication, and no small degree of high critical argle-bargle, to back themselves up. Godard seems to me to be continually about finding ways to demonstrate he is a million times smarter than anyone else in the (darkened) room, which his followers are as much at pains to defend seemingly on any terms within reach, on grounds of avant-garde experimentalism, defiant anti-convention, unique vision, I-know-you-are-but-what-is-he, the continuing perception of a widespread and penetrating influence, and as many others as can be and are adduced in seminar environments. And all that may be true enough. But they do tend to derive almost purely from the cerebrum. My problem is more acutely with the overall experience his pictures tend to deliver for me, which is narrow and small.

Psycho (1960)

USA, 109 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Joseph Stefano, Robert Bloch
Photography: John L. Russell
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: George Tomasini
Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland, Frank Albertson, Patricia Hitchcock, Mort Mills

Alfred Hitchcock’s full-tilt stab at horror must have come as something of a shock to those who had grown used to the technicolor antics and capers of all those sparkling Hollywood stars in Hitchcock’s ‘50s productions, whatever weird trails they might have gone down, such as Vertigo. But Psycho remains a classic horror show to this day, one of the pictures most associated with Hitchcock and one by which he may be best remembered. It came at the tail end of arguably his greatest run, after Vertigo and North by Northwest, and it heralded the dawn of the kandy-kolored tangerine dream decade that was to follow with the grit and harsh contrasts of a movie that was black and white on multiple levels to its core.

It takes a number of chances, most notably in the single-minded way it goes for the look and feel of a tawdry low-budget shocker as well as in the relatively brief screen time given to its female lead, Janet Leigh. In many ways, and in spite of its feature length, it operates as a particularly meticulous installment of his TV show, complete with story twists and surprises and a clumsy everything's-all-right-after-all coda, grounded in the reassuring avuncular tones of a professional psychiatrist. Because of those story twists and surprises, and how artfully the picture manages to husband its secrets, I feel obligated at this point to mention that spoilers are ahead.

La Dolce Vita (1960)

Italy/France, 174 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Photography: Otello Martelli
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Cattozzo
Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimee, Yvonne Furneaux, Magali Noel, Alain Cuny, Annibale Ninchi, Walter Santesso, Alain Dijon, Nico

I'm starting to feel like this whole thing with Fellini is just not going to work out for me. I do appreciate a handful of his pictures from the '50s, but David Thomson in his Biographical Dictionary of Film is there to tell me I'm wrong, warning that those movies need "to be put firmly in [their] place" as "slick, mechanical stories, feeding on superficial feelings and uncritical of sentimentality or grand effects." (They include I Vitelloni, La Strada, Il Bidone, and Le notti di Cabiria, the latter of which is one of my all-time favorites, although I believe I am coming to understand better all the time that that is probably more a matter of its lead player Giulietta Masina than her husband Fellini.)

On the other hand, La Dolce Vita and 8½ both occupy the top 25 of the critical consensus list of the best films of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (currently #25 and #6 respectively). For me, they are both overlong exercises in overweening indulgence that only occasionally redeem themselves with arresting sequences (the majority of which involve music) and momentary diversions of intriguing images. I'll go with the critics to the extent that 8½ is the better of the two—in fairness, Thomson is nearly as dubious about La Dolce Vita as he is of the '50s films—but I think I may be about done with the enterprise now.

Back at the Chicken Shack (1960)

Admittedly, most of the stuff I post here I am long familiar with, and it is old. This is a slightly different case—old, but relatively new to me. In fact, there are large swaths of jazz unknown to me. This, from Blue Note, with Smith playing Hammond B-3 organ, Kenny Burrell guitar, and Stanley Turrentine tenor sax, is a whole new kind of all-day jazz to me—the kind that doesn't focus practically exclusively on saxophone and/or Miles Davis. It's a pure delight, warm and deceptively laidback and full of nice moments and little surprises. As for once again offering old music, I can only repeat a version of what Bob Dylan said once on his radio show. I don't have anything against new music, but there's a lot more old music than new. P.S. I want that dog on the cover.

My Favorite Things (1960)

John Coltrane ushered in the '60s with an album that is arguably the epitome -- the apotheosis -- of all day jazz. With only four tracks on this debut of his quartet with McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, there's ample space for the modalities to unfold, ingratiate, pivot sideways, surprise, go quiet, hit the groove again, and guide your head, on conscious and unconscious levels alike. "My Favorite Things" went on to become something like a signature song for Coltrane & co., a staple in performance and frequently appearing on his live releases. I think, when Steve Wynn starts yelping about John Coltrane music, this is the kind of thing he's talking about. But really, it's hard to go wrong with this guy, or this album. So go ahead. Play it again.