The Italian Job | Alain Delon (centre) became an international film star as a result of his work in Rocco and His Brothers.
ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS
Directed by Luciano Visconti. Starring Alain Delon, Renato Salvatori, Annie Girardot. Sun-Wed, Mar 30-Apr 2 (7pm). Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel).
4 Stars
The “economic miracle” that caused mass migration from the impoverished south to the industrially virile north has been the basis (or at least the background) for a number of classic Italian films.
The quest for material comfort, the push and pull of family—these were just some of the questions addressed by Italian filmmakers still grappling with the aftereffects of World War II. In Alberto Lattuada’s recently re-released 1962 black comedy Mafioso, for instance, a successful Sicilian migrant takes his Milanese wife and daughters back home to meet his poor family, with much culture clashing as a result. Luchino Visconti’s 1960 epic Rocco and His Brothers is the reverse: it follows a family of Southerners as they disembark in Milan, searching for a better life for all—and there’s no comedy in it whatsoever.
What we get instead is a good old-fashioned melodrama. Family matriarch Rosaria Parondi has brought her four sons to the big city in order to escape the inescapable poverty that blights their home region. Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), the eldest, is already living in the city, married and working at a factory. The youngest, Rocco (Alain Delon), and middle brother Simone (Renato Salvatori) both attempt to make a go of it as boxers, but they find themselves entangled over the same girl, a self-described whore named Nadia (Annie Girardot).
Rocco is a good son, idealistic and fiercely loyal to family; Simone, however, falls prey to the excesses of his character and gets caught up in an extravagance of emotion that threatens to unravel what few ties still bind the Parondi clan. What follows is a well-constructed soap opera, a meditation on lust and greed that found attentive watchers in first-generation Italian-American directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola—the latter of whom no doubt made special note of the expressive film score by Nina Rota, later hiring him to supply music for The Godfather.
With gorgeous yet bleak black-and-white photography, capturing Milan at its most unforgiving, Rocco and His Brothers appears at first to belong to the Italian neorealist tradition that Visconti played an important part in developing. In actuality it’s a sentimental film, operatic even, at times just missing caricaturing its subjects—like a Harold Robbins paperback as filmed by Roberto Rossellini. Visconti was a Marxist, but most importantly he was a humanist, and his portrayal of the Parondi family is tender, knowing. Even as the urban-versus-rural motif plays out, he never reduces his characters to economic ciphers the way that the city they toil in does.
