April 25: Rocco and His Brothers

Rocco and His Brothers

Looking for opportunity, five brothers move north with their mother to Milan. There, Simone and Rocco find fame, in the boxing ring, and love, in the same woman – Nadia. Jealousy mounts, blood is shed, and a striving family faces self-destruction in this incisive, sensuous, emotionally bruising masterwork from director Luchino Visconti (The Leopard, Senso).

With an operatic Nino Rota score and Giuseppe Rotunno’s glimmering, on-location cinematography, Rocco and His Brothers “represents the artistic apotheosis of Italian neorealism,” says A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Drawing from Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann, Visconti arranges his signature themes – modernity, class tension, familial discord – across an epic canvas that directly influenced later Italian-American sagas by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori, and Claudia Cardinale lead the cast of gorgeous unknowns who rose to stardom in the wake of this film’s bow at the 1960 Venice Film Festival, where it was greeted with scandal and won the Special Jury Prize. (Milestone Films)