FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Erica Derrick By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Kaelan Mccaffrey Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

howardeisman Epic! Operatic! Dramatic black and white photographs! Compelling! There is wizardry in this cinematic effort. But…overlong, too histrionic for American audiences, slow moving, and predictable. This film purports to be the story of naïve and innocent country folk who come to the big city and face difficult life choices. This is expressed by characters in two long, sociologically tinged speeches. Minus these speeches, this sociological realism is just a back story. The main theme of the story line is biblical; the secondary theme, prosaic. I had to read the English subtitles to follow the story, so I may have missed a lot. While reading, the visuals and the actors' expressions sometimes get lost. Ann Girardot does fine job as a prostitute who has a heart of gold-sometimes. Salvatori is great as is Paxinou but all these roles often strain credibility. Delon looks saintly and lost. Everything is a nanosecond removed from an uproar. A gym manager tears up his office, Citizen Kane style, because he doesn't like the quality of boxers in his gym-and his character is inconsequential.I waited four decades before I could see this movie. I was not disappointed because I no longer expect epiphanies. I simply want to be brought into the story and be interested in its outcome. No more. Thus, I recommend this movie. The story is compelling. It was well done and has great cinema historic value, even with its flaws.,

kijii Although I've seen several Visconti films, this is my favorite. In some ways it reminds me of Raging Bull made twenty years later. This is partially due to its story about the rise and fall of a boxer and partially due to its broad view of the boxer's personal life and volatile relationships. Also, both films display stunningly black and white photography. Although Raging Bull was a epic biopic about an actual boxer, it's hard to believe that a film historian like Martin Scorsese wasn't heavily influenced by Rocco and His Brothers when he made Raging Bull.This film also reminds me a bit of grand opera (without the music). It is pregnant with dramatic human emotions such as love, hate, jealousy, revenge, murder, and remorse. THIS beautiful 'opera' is in five 'acts,' each named for one of the five Parondi brothers: (Act 1) Vincenzo, (Act 2) Simone, (Act 3) Rocco, (Act 4) Ciro, and (Act 5) Luca. The five 'acts' of the three-hour movie aren't, in any way, short stories or vignettes exclusive to the character named: the entire movie is about all of them and always within a family context. However, the film sections (named after the brothers) tend to give the audience some structural clues about how the characters evolve, with each taking on more prominent roles at different times in the story.Greek actress Katina Paxinou, who had won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1943 as a Spanish freedom fighter in For Whom the Bell Tolls and played in several Greek tragedies, seems equally at home here as the quintessentially volatile Italian mother, Rosaria Parondi. After her husband's accidental death, she fulfills her lifelong dream of moving from the country in the South of Italy to the big city of Milan. This is where she always dreamed of living, and this is where she believes her sons can make successes of their lives.As Rosaria and four of her sons arrive in Milan on the train, their eyes are full of hope and excitement for the future. They expect to be greeted by the fifth and eldest son, Vincenzo (Spiros Focás), but he is not there. When they trace him down, he is celebrating his upcoming marriage with his fiancee's family. When his own large family arrives on the doorstep of the party, his plans suddenly change. His new priority is to help his family get settled in Milan.Rosaria and her sons take a house and start looking for work. Almost instantly God provides them with a snowstorm, and the four oldest brothers take to the streets to shovel snow for startup money. While Vincenzo already has a job in housing construction, Simone (Renato Salvatori) looks for a future as a prizefighter and falls in love with a loose but cute and outgoing girl, Nadia (Annie Girardot). When Simone's trainer becomes concerned about his lifestyle, he calls his brother, Rocco (Alain Delon), into his office and asks him to look out for Simone —watching to see that he stays away from drinking, smoking, and the wrong kind of company. Although the Parondi family is very close, friction develops between Simone and Rocco when Simone's boxing career starts to take a tumble, and Rocco is asked to take his place. As Simone's life and career gradually slide, that of the idealistic Rocco succeeds. Rocco knows that Nadia is a troubled girl, from a troubled home, and that she has a prison record. She had openly told him about these things before. He feels sorry for her and wants her to be happy. Simone takes Rocco's friendship and concern for Nadia as love, and this, coupled with the two brothers' reversal of fortune, makes Simone jealous of him. This comes to a head when, Simone and his gang follow Rocco and Nadia into a dark field one night. There, as Simone's gang holds Rocco back, Simone rapes Nadia in front of him. He then tries to further humiliate him by drawing him into a fight. Unable to fight his brother, Rocco is badly beaten and left lying in the gutter. Not wanting to worry his mother, and with no where else to go, he stays with Vincenzo and his wife for the night. Ciro is the steady brother who works as a technician in an Alfa Romero factory and plans to get married soon. In the Ciro section of the film, we learn that Simone's life continues on a downward spiral as he moves into his mother's house with his 'whore,' Nadia. When his debts become overwhelming, Rocco is forced to sign a long- term fighting contract as the only way to get Simone totally out of debt. Ciro serves as a go- between for his two estranged brothers---one too hard and the other too idealistic. The final portion of the film is the Luca section. It serves as something of a summary—a coda--for the entire Parondi family epic. This section compares what life was in the country and what it had become in the city. Although Ciro tries to guide the youngest brother, Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), back to the country before it is too late; before his life is too settled; and while he can still change; he wants Luca to understand the past, what is important and what isn't. To Crio, Luca represents the family's future.

Armand I am a fan of Visconti movies. for the Barroco nuances and poetry of small things. for beauty of details and courage to present slices of a neorealism in which is mixed nostalgic crumbs of a world fall and need of new society definition. Rocco was first movie by him who I saw it. a film - bitter story. picture of a family, map of searches, touching drawing of a victory of city and the love as delicate web. and, sure, one of wonderful roles of Alain Delon. in fact, a gate, or only a window to a time who becomes ours. because story is universal. and the figure of poor mother - letter of a never ending poem , is remarkable. end of an age. seed of a new form of self definition for Italian cinema. but, very important, testimony, not about a period. but a state of soul. must see it !

A. Meyer Unlike others, including Roger Ebert, I see "Rocco and His Brothers" as a devastating condemnation of traditional Italian peasant family values. In the U.S. only slavery compares to what the old peasant classes of Europe experienced --legally free but entrenched in centuries of oppression, rural poverty and ignorance. In Italy, the film tells us, these conditions gave rise to the kind of loyalty that values family ties above everything, including the law, moral principles, even individual human life.These are the "family values" that when extended to the neighborhood produce the mafia (then at its apex in 1960). And when extended nationally produce Fascism. Individuals in Rocco's family are enslaved and held down by these values. The film isn't about good and bad people, or about idyllic countryside versus evil city. Ciro, the everyman hero of the story, albeit a small role, reflects at the end that Rocco will not survive in the country either. The film is a reflection on tragedy awaiting both good and bad who cling to old, destructive values. If you're by nature not so good, these values will make you worse. If you're a good person, they'll lead you to destroy yourself and others.When the family first moves to Milan, two passsers-by comment on them: "old country." Viewers at the time most likely understood old and new as pre- and post WWII. From the beginning the film sets up a dichotomy between old and new: Rocco's family's values amid the unending new construction projects in the film.Look at Mama, bless her heart, that unsentimental image of what poverty and ignorance hath wrought. She brings her five sons to Milano –why? As she says, so they can get rich, and she can walk down a big city street hearing herself called "Signora." She doesn't care how they get rich --killed or maimed in the boxing ring (Simone may have been brain damaged there –- Mama still wants him to go back and wants Rocco to box also), theft, whatever. Then there's her rejection of Vincenzo, the eldest, ostensibly because of his accidental baby, but actually because he's now got a wife and baby to support instead of her, so obsessed is she with financial security (which self-centeredness she justifies as "keeping the family together"). No one gets a life of his own in Mama's view. She won't even go to the christening of her first grandchild, of whom she's jealous. Rocco's in the army. Does Mama care about his life there? Her letter asks for more money, although he's living on a practically non existent stipend. Children exist for the support and care of their parents, or they don't exist at all.Simone and Rocco, yin and yang in this destructive universe, are photographed together in close physical contact more often than not: Simone, self centered emblem of old machismo, and Rocco, sacrificing himself and others in the name of family, in his mental and spiritual superiority more destructive than Simone. They're two sides of the same coin, like all opposites. (A wonderful symbol of Marx's dialectic). It's "Rocco and His Brothers" because Rocco is the guiding light leading his brothers down the wrong path for the right reasons. Ciro, rejecting these old values, striving to better himself, and Luca, too young to be completely imbued with them, are the positive lights to a possibly better future.