Rocco and His Brothers (15.)
Directed by Luchino Visconti. 1960.
Starring Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girodot, Katina Paxinou, Max Cartier, Spiros Focas and Claudia Cardinale. Black and White. 177 mins
1960 was a bold and exciting time for Italian cinema. In Roma, the cold breeze of existential angst was chasing Mastroianni around as he invented the term paparazzi in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Down in Sicily Antonioni idea of adventure was having his cast wander aimlessly over that island in search of something or other. And up in Milano Visconti was filming five brothers wailing about their mama.
Rocco and His Brothers was a landmark in a number of ways. It made a star out of the French actor Delon, and helped establish Cardinale. For Visconti it was the move onto a big canvass, the kind of epic scale that he would explore more fully in his next film, The Leopard. The story is comparatively small – a mother moves her family of four sons from the poverty of Sicily to the bright lights of Milan, reuniting the family with her eldest son who is already there and engaged to Claudia Cardinale. The settings are tenement blocks, building sites, bits of wasteland and boxing gyms but Visconti's visuals have some of the glorious sweep of Leone.
Once in the new city the brother start to graft and skive their way in the new and often hostile environment. Northerners tend to look down at the southern arrivals as untrustworthy peasants and work is hard to come by. In one early scene they are ecstatic to wake to falling snow because it means that will be able to work today. Delon is more or less a bystander for the first half of the film but gradually the film centres in on a love triangle between the saintly Rocco (Delon), his boxing champ brother Simone (Salvatori) and the loose woman Nadia (Girodot.)
Visconti was a creature of cinema, had an instinctive feel for it but he was also immersed in the theatre and its tolerance for the excesses of melodrama. Half the cast may be French, the mother a Greek and even Cardinale was a native French speaker (all Italian films were dubbed at the time – the disc gives you the choice of watching it in Italian or French) the film is very, very Italian. It has the grandeur of the nation's best cinema but also the caricature of Italian masculinity – all the sons will do everything for their adored mother, can't break through the Madonna/whore fixation.
Delon isn't Italian but has had Italian bestowed upon him and he wears it well. He is a magnificent screen presence but Rocco is a ridiculous figure, too sensitive, too goody goody, too much the mama's boy. His reaction to a horrific incident* two thirds of the way through is perverse and bizarre and it will surely alienate a modern day viewer.
Rocco and His Brothers has the power and formal precision of a major film but its story is contrived melodrama. It's art on the outside, soap on the inside.
Extras.
"Les coulisses du tournage", a 2003 French documentary about the film
A 1999 interview with Visconti's cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno
An interview with actress Claudia Cardinale
A 2002 interview with actress Annie Giradot
"Luchino Visconti", an hour long documentary about the life and work of Visconti
Two vintage newsreels
Original Italian trailer
A 40-page booklet featuring a piece written by Guido Aristarco; A 1960 essay by the director; a vintage interview with Visconti and rare archival imagery
* When Simone, outraged that his former lover is now going out with his younger brother, assaults Nadia in front of him, and he subsequently suggests that she should go back to Simone.
Directed by Luchino Visconti. 1960.
Starring Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girodot, Katina Paxinou, Max Cartier, Spiros Focas and Claudia Cardinale. Black and White. 177 mins
1960 was a bold and exciting time for Italian cinema. In Roma, the cold breeze of existential angst was chasing Mastroianni around as he invented the term paparazzi in Fellini's La Dolce Vita. Down in Sicily Antonioni idea of adventure was having his cast wander aimlessly over that island in search of something or other. And up in Milano Visconti was filming five brothers wailing about their mama.
Rocco and His Brothers was a landmark in a number of ways. It made a star out of the French actor Delon, and helped establish Cardinale. For Visconti it was the move onto a big canvass, the kind of epic scale that he would explore more fully in his next film, The Leopard. The story is comparatively small – a mother moves her family of four sons from the poverty of Sicily to the bright lights of Milan, reuniting the family with her eldest son who is already there and engaged to Claudia Cardinale. The settings are tenement blocks, building sites, bits of wasteland and boxing gyms but Visconti's visuals have some of the glorious sweep of Leone.
Once in the new city the brother start to graft and skive their way in the new and often hostile environment. Northerners tend to look down at the southern arrivals as untrustworthy peasants and work is hard to come by. In one early scene they are ecstatic to wake to falling snow because it means that will be able to work today. Delon is more or less a bystander for the first half of the film but gradually the film centres in on a love triangle between the saintly Rocco (Delon), his boxing champ brother Simone (Salvatori) and the loose woman Nadia (Girodot.)
Visconti was a creature of cinema, had an instinctive feel for it but he was also immersed in the theatre and its tolerance for the excesses of melodrama. Half the cast may be French, the mother a Greek and even Cardinale was a native French speaker (all Italian films were dubbed at the time – the disc gives you the choice of watching it in Italian or French) the film is very, very Italian. It has the grandeur of the nation's best cinema but also the caricature of Italian masculinity – all the sons will do everything for their adored mother, can't break through the Madonna/whore fixation.
Delon isn't Italian but has had Italian bestowed upon him and he wears it well. He is a magnificent screen presence but Rocco is a ridiculous figure, too sensitive, too goody goody, too much the mama's boy. His reaction to a horrific incident* two thirds of the way through is perverse and bizarre and it will surely alienate a modern day viewer.
Rocco and His Brothers has the power and formal precision of a major film but its story is contrived melodrama. It's art on the outside, soap on the inside.
Extras.
"Les coulisses du tournage", a 2003 French documentary about the film
A 1999 interview with Visconti's cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno
An interview with actress Claudia Cardinale
A 2002 interview with actress Annie Giradot
"Luchino Visconti", an hour long documentary about the life and work of Visconti
Two vintage newsreels
Original Italian trailer
A 40-page booklet featuring a piece written by Guido Aristarco; A 1960 essay by the director; a vintage interview with Visconti and rare archival imagery
* When Simone, outraged that his former lover is now going out with his younger brother, assaults Nadia in front of him, and he subsequently suggests that she should go back to Simone.
