Rocco and His Brothers

Rating:
Summary: A very complex movie; hard to describe or rate
Review: "Rocco and His Brothers" is certainly a grand movie. The acting is simply superb, especially that of Annie Girardot - her character is passionate, erotic and strong, exactly the kind of woman who can rouse such fatal feelings and change fates even though she's a prostitute.

I especially admire Visconti for being able to create such an accurate and vivid portrait of Italians. I could never understand their passions, their love-hate relationships, their family ties, honesty and betrayal being so close together. Which comes first - family or justness? In short, I don't think I'll ever be able to understand the way they lead their lives and their strange outlook on life. To an ordinary viewer, like me, most of the characters, ESPECIALLY Rocco, seem to be insane...

You'd probably like to know why I didn't give this truly unforgettable movie 5 stars. The answer is simple: it was difficult to watch. Painful almost. I found myself wishing I could kill one of the main characters more than half a time. There was no relief of tension. The movie was quite long. And - I simply cannot understand the way Italians live and treat each other. It's beyond me.

I'm glad I saw this movie; it had a great impact on me. However, it was so very 'heavy' I won't watch it again for a long time... but I will. Sometime.

Rating:
Summary: Nice try
Review: "Rocco and his Brothers" is one of Visconti's most famous films, yet it seems to fall flat. Four brothers and their mother journey to northern Italy to join their brother Vincenzo. While there, one amazing even after another occurs to test the bonds of the family.
The film is divided into five sections, one for each of the brothers yet the film really centers around Rocco and Simone. Simone plays the stereotypical bad boy. He comes to the north and begins to see a prostitute and to steal. His criminal impulses lead him to rape his ex-girlfriend (who at the time is dating Rocco) which seems completely out of character. Yes he has a bad streak but the scene seems contrived. He rapes the girl to hurt noth her and Rocco and then proceeds to punch Rocco to the point of unconsciousness. Up until this point he seems more of a rebel and than suddenly he turns into a hard-core criminal. Rocco's character isn't much better. He is depicted in a saintly matter and while this is purposeful, he saintliness is so extreme that one gets aggravated with the character. He constantly forgives Simone and constantly "turns his other cheek". In short, all the character are extremely stereotyped and are manipulated to fit the script instead of being believable. Visconti just tries to cram too much into one film and in doing so loses track of his characters.

The only thing that saves the film in any way is the acting. The two main brothers, Simone and Rocco, and Nadia are all played remarkabley well inspite of the despicable script. Annie Girardot who plays Nadia puts in the best performance and makes the viewer wonder if she is the only sane person in all of Italy.

Rating:
Summary: Great movie, Good DVD transfer, No extra
Review: 5 star movie, 4 star DVD transfer, 0 star bonus feature as there is none, not even a trailer. Image Entertainment has good intention and concept as Criterion but lack of extra effort.

Rating:
Summary: Visconti's Stunning Black & White Epic
Review: A big passionate film from the Italian sixties. Beautiful to watch. A glorious stew of stark realism and operatic melodrama, spear-headed by the amazing performance of Renato Salvatori. Why isn't this movie on DVD?

Rating:
Summary: A GREAT MOVIE
Review: A great, great, great movie! That's all I can say!
I never see a movie so well acted, directed and edited.
After I turned off the TV, I could still see Rocco's eyes-
beautiful, but full with pain and hope. Only the great Alain
Delon have such beautiful and expressive eyes!I heard that
Visconti couldn't find a suitable actor in the bigining but
when he saw Alain Delon accidentally, he shouted "he is Rocco!"

Rating:
Summary: The Boxer, the Saint and the Prostitute
Review: Alternately striking and tedious, "Rocco and His Brothers" is an awkward blend of social realism and operatic melodrama. Presumably an attempt to dramatize the social consequences of Italy's internal Diaspora from South to North, the film suffers from the contradictory aims of trying to make one family socially typical while also individually compelling. All of the characters are at one level "types," whose dramatic function is to reveal aspects of social transformation. Most, however, are also burdened with "individual" character touches that seem both contrived and overwrought.

Nowhere is this more the case than the central conflict between the unbelievably saintly Rocco (Alain Delon) and his wastrel brother Simone (Renato Salvatori) over the love of a prostitute, Nadia (Annie Girardot). The hackneyed triangular situation is compelling thanks to the strength of the performances and the larger-than-life passions it unleashes. Unfortunately, none of it feels very "Realistic," in the sense of revealing aspects of experience through observed behavior and detail. We are far too aware of the broad brush strokes for the situation to work as anything other than heavy-handed, if undeniably effective, manipulation. The emotions are so out of keeping with the film's social goals as to tear the film apart. Or, to put it differently, there are no doubt many love triangles among the working class, and some may well result in the tragedies "Rocco" dramatizes. It is simply that this situation as depicted is not convincing as typical, nor does it reveal as much about social reality as it does about the filmmaker's desires and ambitions.

Visconti was one of the "Big Three" of Italian NeoRealism (the others being Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica). His work usually demonstrated a tension between his social realist interests (he was a member of the Italian Communist party) and his experience as a world renown opera director steeped in the Western aesthetic tradition. (He was also a Duke with a family lineage going back to Charlemagne's era.) These contradictions are at work in varying degree in all of his work, but are rarely as apparent as in "Rocco." The film is never anything less than a committed work of art. It may not make much sense, but it certainly isn't sloppy or shoddy. It is, however, almost fatally uneven, the perhaps inevitable result of a director uncertain where he wanted to go. Visconti's greatest work, "The Leopard," his next film but one after "Rocco," finally resolved that question. So when can we look forward to that appearing on DVD?

Rating:
Summary: Family affairs.
Review: Archetypal epic involving a Sicilian peasant family forced by poverty to move to the big city -- in this case, Milan. There, the mother and her four young sons join the oldest son, who's got a steady job and a steady girl. From this description thus far, you might feel inclined to pass on the movie because you've seen all this before . . . and you'd be right. Mario Puzo and -- later -- Francis Ford Coppola borrowed heavily from *Rocco and His Brothers* when they created their respective *Godfather* epics. Indeed, Rocco, his mother, his brothers, the prostitute, all begin as "types". There's a lot of "Mamma mia!" and hands raised in prayer; there's a lot of sweaty machismo; there's a lot of "amore". I think director Luchino Visconti had wanted to say something about proletarian post-War Italy with his stereotypical Porondi family. But he must have fell in love with them, because they burst free from their tedious Neo-Realist origins and become whole characters capable of change and inner growth. We are certainly grateful for that: all too often, the "realism" in Italian Neo-Realism becomes merely politics . . . and politics dates pretty quickly. Instead, Visconti lavishes his settings and characters with Dickensian detail to the point that by movie's end, they no longer seem like stereotypes, archetypes, or any other types. For a director noted for Neo-Realism, Visconti had a flair for bombastic grand tragedy and earthy good humor, which he's able to pull off so brilliantly in this movie because of the inexorable logic of the plot and the fastidious piling-upon-piling of detail and deep understanding of his creations. *Rocco and His Brothers* was an important movie for Visconti to make: from here, he dropped the pointy-headed dogmas of then-current Italian cinema, and, along with Fellini and others, struck out in a direction entirely his own, culminating in other masterworks like *The Damned* and *Death in Venice*. Sure, *Rocco* is a serious-minded social document, but it also has thoroughly engrossing melodramatics to spare . . . and that's what seems more important to us, 42 years later. [For the 2nd time in one month, I'm forced to gripe about "Image Entertainment"'s DVD presentation. Onerous enough is that there's no features, and the print is clearly from unrestored celluloid . . . but if what a reviewer below said is correct, 12 minutes are STILL missing from the movie, despite the claim on the box that it's fully restored and uncut. Can they get away with lying like this? Don't food products have to be truthful on their list of ingredients --? why are entertainment products any different? And why on earth do companies like Image and Fox-Lorber have a catalog of masterworks when they clearly have no interest in presenting them with the attention and care that they deserve? All that said, get the movie anyway, because who knows when a more scrupulous company will buy the rights and do Visconti's classic justice.]

Rating:
Summary: All In The Family
Review: For years now my favorite Luchino Visconti film has been "Ludwig". His grand sweeping epic. I've always felt that was his most ambitious film. True, Visconti has made other film that are great in their scope like "The Leopard", or "The Damned". But, none has touched me on such a personal level as "Ludwig", and then I saw this film. While, I admit, I don't think it's as grand as "Ludwig", "Rocco and his Brothers", is a powerful, emotional, saga.

Luchino Visconti is a director whom I've always had wonderful things to say about. He is one of my favorite directors of all time. And I always feel there is something to admire about all of his films, even those I may not be crazy about, I still found something good to say about them.

"Rocco and his Brothers" is a story about a family of five brothers and their mother who move from the country into the city. The brothers are played by Alain Delon (Rocco), Renato Salvatori (Simone), Spiros Focas (Vincenzo), Max Cartier (Ciro), & Rocco Vidolazzi (Luca). The movie creates little episodic chapters for each brother. Telling you briefly something about them, in about 30-40 minutes.

Now, the only fault I have with the film is, I feel it doesn't devote enough time to all the brothers. For instance characters like Ciro or Luca are not given much depth. Very little is known about them. The role of Vincezo is so-so, over-all, it is better than the other two brothers. What really makes the movie so wonderful are the three focal characters; Rocco (Delon), Simone (Salvatori) & Nadia (Annie Girardot) a woman of the streets who begins a love affair with Simone, and then starts a rival between two of the brothers, I honestly don't want to give too much away. But they have the best parts. It is because of them the movie has as much heart as it does. Visconti does an amazing job directing them. And it is because of the story-line concerning these three characters that I can "forgive" the film's short comings with the other characters.

Though the film is hard to find, just keep looking. It will all be worth it. I personally wouldn't recommend buying the film on vhs...if you have a dvd player, your better off buying the dvd... . I was lucky and saw the movie on TCM.

"Rocco and his Brothers" is a film Visconti fans should be pleased with. Those of us who have seen will never forget the impact it left on us the first time we saw it.

The rest of the cast includes; Katina Paxinou (Rosaria, the mother), Alessandra Panaro (Ciro's fiancess), and Claudia Cardinale (who plays Ginetta, Vincenzo's wife. She of course would be a major star appearing in other Visconti films like "Conversation Piece", and "The Leopard", also "Big Deal On Madonna Street" and Fellini's "8 1\2")

Bottom-line: One of Luchino Visconti's most absorbing dramas. A film of tremendous heart and passion. With standout performances by it's three lead stars.

Rating:
Summary: rocco and his brothers
Review: In my opinion one of most important movies,defenetly a classic,a must for any movie fan.It takes you through many emotions.
Beautifully filmed,great acting,it makes you feel as if you were
there.I also have to mantion Alain Delon who did an amaizing job as a yung Rocco.Another important aspect of a movie to me is a great music composed by amazing Nino Rota.
I highly recomand this fine piece of art.

Rating:
Summary: What movie did the other reviewers watch?
Review: Luchino Visconti is a master of the epic, however, his epic style always takes place within a family and always leads downward towards an inevitable doom. His movies tends to remind us of the 'Godfather' but Visconti, dare I say, even gets closer to the marrow of the issues than Coppola does at his best (I am nevertheless, a big fan of 'the Godfather'). To Visconti the finest details of a film are of the utmost importance - you can watch a film like 'Rocco' or the 'Leopard' several times and still miss things. Visconti's cinema is one which reveals itself in every character, in every piece of furniture, in every moment.
'Rocco and his Brothers' is if not my favorite Italian film - certainly one of the top ten. To see the brilliant camera work of Giussepe Rotuno combined with Visconti at his peak is simply magnificent. The film itself is extremely radical in structure - slowly revealing itself - focusing sometimes on what appear to be small conversations - but everything is woven to make a perfect whole - wherein the seams are all neat - and though at times are barely hanging together - it always holds as if there is some greater purpose in mind. Visconti reveals much about both the family and their society. One could be bold and comment that the whole film is about fighting to survive (sometimes fighting one another). Life - sometimes- is like a boxing match but the match is sometimes not the one you choose to fight - you are thrown into it and some of the factors working for or against you are money, pride, love, and family.