best movie i've ever seen.

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

I am delighted to find that decades later this has lost NONE of its sweeping power and operatic splendor. Renato Salvatori should have received a shelf of acting prizes for this role - it is one of the most intense and beautiful acting jobs since Marlon Brando filmed 'Streetcar'. Close behind is the legendary role of Annie Girardot's doomed 'Nadia'. Alain Delon is heartbreaking and overwhelmed by love, life, all that is demanded of him by family, everything.A great movie carries all before it. Claudia Cardinale is given a 'neo-realist' simplicity that actually accents her beauty far better than the over made up and stylized version of herself we came to know. Katina Paxinou is a force of nature and though Magnani would have been magnificent in the role she would have been 'too Magnani'. Paxinou vanishes into the role of the mother with perfect understanding of every gesture, word and shade of feeling asked of her. Even small roles - take for instance the owner of the laundry - are fabulous! SO much good acting it is almost TOO much good acting. I could describe a dozen more small roles played to perfection. Don't watch any great film for awhile till your mind and heart are good and hungry and rediscover this masterpiece.

This movie is not an epic drama due to its large scale but simple because of its story! It's a family drama and truly honestly one of the best that I have ever seen.The story all sounds so very simple and standard on paper but simple fact is that it's all being executed very well, by director Luchino Visconti, who also helped to write the story (along with 6 others!).What I like about it and the overall movie, is that it feels quite modern all for normal 1960 standards. It's definitely not being melodramatic or over-the-top in any other way imaginable and stuff and characters are being all kept as realistic as possible, which helps to let the emotions and drama come across more realistically.The movie also feels modern with its storytelling and especially its pacing. The movie is quite long, as you could expect from a family drama but it really doesn't feel like a long movie at all and there just aren't any slower, more boring or uninteresting moments in it. A true accomplishment from Luchino Visconti, who directed quite a few movies that I really liked, such as "Ossessione" "Senso" and "Il gattopardo", that also all definitely show some similarities to this movie with some of its themes. But I also must say that this movie probably still remains the best Luchino Visconti that I have yet seen.Love plays a key role in this movie but it's not the happy kind of love. It's the kind of love that can drive people and even entire families apart, as all happens in this movie. It's really a powerful drama about love and family, in which two brothers and a girl play a big role.Also surprising that this is quite a good sports movie. Boxing becomes an important element in this movie, which even almost becomes an entirely different movie of its own. And I don't know, I always like boxing in movies, so I was quite pleased to watch it all.It's a very well shot and told movie, that also get beautiful acted out by its actors. It all provides the movie with some very powerful and effective moments, including a great ending!9/10 http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Katina Paxinou is Mama Parondi. She moves with her four sons from an impoverished village in southern Italy to the big city of Milan in the north. Three sons -- Salvatore (Simone), Delon (Rocco), and Focas (Vincenzo) have varied careers trying to make a living in what's supposed to be an anomic atmosphere. The family falls apart, a bit like "The Grapes of Wrath." It's a gripping film once in gets going but it still induces fatigue, almost three hours long, loud and theatrical, and filmed in gritty black and white. Some reviewers have mentioned the beauty of the images but it got by me, except for some startling shots during a climactic stabbing. Almost all the settings are drab and smoky. The night scenes were shot at night with stark but minimal lighting. When a man rapes a woman they roll around in the mud and belt one another, although how a man who is supposed to be drunk, enraged, surrounded by horrified witnesses, freezing, and splashed with mud can rape anybody -- well, it's beyond me.Delon is young, handsome, naive, loyal, and generous. I guess he represents the virtues and values of the sunny South. "You must have faith," he tells Annie Girardot, the hooker he has fallen in love with. "Faith in what?" "In everything, everybody." Wouldn't it be pretty to think so, to quote someone of a tougher temperament.The acting is okay. Delon certainly looks the part of the unspoiled naif. Katina Paxinou as the queen of this brood is always on the edge of frenzy, dashing around and running off at the hands, full of territorial pride and prejudice. The best role may be that of Renato Salvatore as the good boxer who doesn't quite have the necessary speed but who is ready to murder anyone who gets too close to the girl friend he hasn't been with in two years, Girardot. He's the son who most clearly illustrates the kind of corrupted behavior the tentacular city generates in weaker personalities. "He had good roots but he was poisoned by the herbs." Although, come to think of it, there's no way of being sure that the same tragic confrontations wouldn't have taken place in the sunny South. Maybe the South is supposed to "stand for something," a kind of state of mind, of mechanical solidarity or a parallel existence like the Chinatown in "Chinatown." The director, Luchino Visconti, was born into an aristocratic and very wealthy family in Milan, so he must know the city, but he brings us down into the murky depths of gymnasiums and cheap cafés. That Visconti was gay had nothing to do with it, but that he belonged to the Communist Party probably did. Nino Rota's fine score anticipates that of "The Godfather."I saw this when it was released and found it enthralling. But I'm beginning to wonder if my patience for long, drawn-out dramas is growing thinner with age. I think it might have been cut by about an hour without bleeding to death.

In 1960's new wave was spinning around Europe giving birth to new movements such as the French New Wave and Novi-film. At the same time Hollywood was in ruins; the studios had lost their money and the filmmakers of the new generation started taking influence from Europe. But perhaps a more interesting perspective on Rocco e i suoi fratelli is Italian neo-realism; a movement which started after the WWII with Rosselini's Rome Open City (1945). There has been some quarrel about whether Italian neo-realism actually started in 1943 with Visconti's Ossessione but the movement is often considered to be postwar. Rocco e i suoi fratelli meant a return to neo-realism by Luchino Visconti - one of the men who started it in the beginning.Rocco e i suoi fratelli marked a turning point in Italian neo-realism and grew out to be one of the finest films of it. All the common themes for Visconti combine in it: betrayal, family and the disintegration of it which makes Rocco even more fascinating and it is often considered to be Visconti's 'magnum opus'. Rocco e i suoi fratelli is a melodramatic family chronicle which tells the story of a family moving from a small town in Southern Italia to a bigger city Milano. Eventually the problems of the new life start to culminate and tear the family apart.Rocco e i suoi fratelli is a complex film - very complex indeed. It basically has two sides; the epic tale and the psychological drama about the disintegration of a family. The beautiful cinematography with the brilliant use of music (or no music at all) and the strong family portrayal put this in the same caliber with some of the finest epic family melodramas by Douglas Sirk. But the film most certainly not is just an epic melodrama and the other side brings it above the finest melodramas in the history of cinema.When the family moves from the small town to the big city they at the same time are forced to leave behind fraternity and old core values. There is a strong contrast here; the old city represents safety, security and fraternity. In the new city they come across with the problems of bourgeois life; unemployment, the cruel business of boxing and prostitution. The critique for capitalism culminates in the Dostoyevskian battle between good (Rocco) and evil (Simone). Prostitution is seen as a norm of bourgeois life, as a rule of the game, but also as a disruptive force; both Rocco and Simone fall in love with the same street girl who eventually breaks up their brotherhood. Luchino Visconti's quintessential critique for bourgeois life was that the only hope for the people who had been beaten down was to attack to the others who had been beaten down. Rocco e i suoi fratelli added some meaningful points to the analysis of capitalism and the cruelty of it. It's a grand epic tale of the society, the family, and a beautiful psychological drama about the disintegration of a family.