Rocco and His Brothers (NR) A groundbreaking, transitional film in Italian cinema and beyond, Luchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers showed the world it was possible to make a movie that honored reality, art and the public, all at the same time. Visconti was a man of deep contradictions — Italy's most high profile gay Marxist (outside of Pasolini), he was a lover of the common man who also happened to be a high born aristocrat — and Rocco embodies and makes cinematic sense of many of the dualisms in the director's nature. The story of a Sicilian widow and her four grown sons who move to the big city in hopes of a better life, Rocco exalts the lower classes even as it grinds them to dust (all the better to weep for them). The film itself is both rigorously naturalistic and highly stylized. The ambiance derived from the location shots of oppressive, industrial Milan is grim, gritty and pure Neo-Realist (a movement to which Visconti was no stranger, having practically invented the form in 1942 with Ossessione and later refined with 1948's masterful La Terra Trema).
By 1960, though, Visconti had moved on to other concerns, and the naturalistic settings of Rocco are offset by an elaborate visual style and a melodramatic narrative that wouldn't be out of place in a movie by Douglas Sirk or even grand opera. The film is filled with all manner of exaggerated primal emotions, repressed urges and lurid, baroque flourishes, as it tells its dovetailing story of sibling rivalry and simple country folks being inevitably, tragically corrupted and then destroyed by the modern city. At the heart of the movie (which is an acknowledged influence on the likes of Scorsese and Coppola) is the triangle between a young prostitute and two of the brothers (Alain Delon and Renato Salvatori) — a triangle that leads to the final, brutal downfall of all of the characters.
Rocco and His Brothers has been restored to its original, nearly-three hour running time for the release of this new Image Entertainment DVD, with all of the material that got the film banned in Italy now reinstated. The movie has always been legendary for its gorgeous, exquisitely composed black-and-white image, and it looks simply stunning on DVD, with strong contrasts throughout and remarkably sharp details visible even within the darkest shots. Best of all the movie's many pleasures might just be Nino Rota's finger-poppin' score, which is a constant delight even in the film's bleakest moments.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2001.