WATCH PARTY: Rocco and His Brothers (1960) Luchino Visconti @ Richard Tucker Lib
Details
We’ll be in the bigger meeting room to the left of the entrance for a 3 hour Italian neorealist epic starring Alain Delon, Annie Girardot, Renato Salvatori. From the director ofThe Leopard (1963) and The Damned (1969).
RATING: Not Rated (but per AI, contains scenes of boxing violence, sexual violence, and mature themes)
RUNTIME: 178 minutes
**SYNOPSIS (via Criterion.com**): 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.
BLURBS:
"A disturbing, despairing epic of the soul, the Italian 'Rocco and His Brothers' is a film both authentic and ambitious, a classic that is as adept at telling individual stories as it is in drawing larger parallels from them." - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
"It is made with a sheer passion that makes most current filmmaking look puny; and though it depicts inarticulate people in a social predicament that is all too realistic, it does them the dignity of giving them a stylised eloquence." - Penelope Gilliat, Observer (UK)
"Everything in this film is composed and performed with such fluency, richness and attack; scene follows scene in a compulsive, addictive way with the characters periodically and rather mysteriously announced with their names as chapter headings, and yet the subsequent action is not obviously concentrated on that figure." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian