Directed by Luchino Visconti • 1960 • Italy
Starring Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori
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. Jealousy mounts, blood is shed, and a striving family faces self-destruction in this incisive, sensuous, emotionally bruising masterwork from director Luchino Visconti. 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.
Up Next in James Gray’s Adventures in Moviegoing
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James Gray on TUNES OF GLORY
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Tunes of Glory
Directed by Ronald Neame • 1960 • United Kingdom
Starring Alec Guinness, John MillsIn Ronald Neame’s TUNES OF GLORY, the incomparable Alec Guinness plays Jock Sinclair—a whiskey-drinking, up-by-the-bootstraps commanding officer of a peacetime Scottish battalion. A lifetime military man, Sinclai...
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James Gray on TOBY DAMMIT