Luchino Visconti’s, 1960 film, “Rocco and his Brothers”, tells the story of a southern Sicilian family’s struggle for survival and acceptance in the socialist, industrial based world of Northern Italy. It is the tale of the Parondi family headed by matriarchal mother Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) and her five sons. Her husband is dead, driving her to drag four of her sons from the South to Milan in the North. The sons are adults Simone (Renato Salvatori in a tour de force performance), Rocco (The French actor Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier) and the young boy Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). They come to Milan, because the oldest son Vincenzo (Spiros Focas) is already living there. The movie starts with their arrival and we are shown their wide eyed wonder at their first view of a large industrial city. At the train station they are met by no one, even though they expected Vincenzo to be there with open arms. Later when they meet Vincenzo we realize that he had no idea they were coming. It will not be the first time in the story that expectations will be crushed by reality. Finding the eldest brother results in the whole family being kicked out of Vincenzo’s fiancees’ home. The whole family then moves into a poor one bedroom basement flat, waking up the next morning to the first snowfall of the Italian winter, which brings joy into their lives as they realize they can find work cleaning the snow. This is basically the first 15 minutes of the film and in it we are introduced to most of the main characters, their predicament and the expansive background that is the city of Milan. This is a City movie and Milan and its social industrial shell, play an important part in the movie. The final main and most pivotal character of the story is a beautiful prostitute Nadia (the magnificent Annie Girardot). She is not your typical hooker with a golden heart. More like the hooker with a dangerous heart. Nadia becomes the catalyst that breaths fire into lives of this southern family. Two brothers (Simone and Rocco), fall for her sexual spell. This is pure Italian Cinema and interactions between characters are loud as everyone, except maybe Rocco, leave all of their emotions on their sleeves. Rosaria as the great Italian mother is held in high reverence by all her sons, even when most of her parental advice is miss-guided. All the sons except for the child Luca search for ways of earning their keep resulting in two of them (Simone and Rocco), becoming prize fighters and both of them falling for the prostitute with the dangerous heart. Love, lust, responsibility and tradition all play into the hands of an operatic and tragic end. Almost everything that happens in the film is over the top. The thing is it works. For this type of high blooded and high emotional people, it is their over the top behavior that drives their lives. The only character who seems in anyway reflective of his actions is the quite Rocco, played by the striking Delon at the birth of his career. However, even Rocco by the last and explosive section of the film, bursts with emotion. The City of Milan plays an impressive part in the movie as each outdoor scene displays a striking urban arena for the characters to perform their operatic drama. At almost three hours, this is a film that is jam packed with action and explodes with feeling. Watching it I realized that the great Italian American directors Scorsese and Coppola did not have to go into their own cultural histories for inspiration on how to interpret the 20th century urban Sicilian. All they had to do was watch, “Rocco and his Brothers”. There would never have been a Sonny or Johnny Boy without Simone and a Michael or Charlie without Rocco. Rosaria is made out of the same cloth as the Corleone Mother, closing her eyes on what is happening around her as long as she has all her sons next to her. In addition, the quite boxing Italian who is Rocco would serve as the true inspiration for Rocky Balboa. Except those American Italian characters were all romanticized, while Rocco and his brothers just want to survive.
1001 Movies before you die 