Rocco and His Brothers

Director: Luchino Visconti

Rocco and His Brothers
Italy, 1960, 179‘
Director: Luchino Visconti

Cast: Alain Delon (Rocco Parondi), Renato Salvatori (Simone Parondi), Annie Girardot (Nadia), Claudia Cardinale (Ginetta Giannelli), Katina Paxinou (Rosaria Parondi)

Selected Awards
Venice 1960 - Special Jury Prize, FIPRESCI Prize, nomination for Golden Lion; David di Donatello – Best Production (Goffredo Lombardo)

 

Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), an impoverished Italian mother, moves to Milan with her close-knit family of five sons to find opportunity in the big city. A heated rivalry begins when two of Rosaria's boys - Rocco (Alain Delon) and Simone (Renato Salvatori) - fall for Nadia (Annie Girardot), a beautiful prostitute with whom each has an affair. As soft-spoken Rocco and brutal Simone both pursue Nadia in their own way, tension between them threatens to tear the family apart.

A disturbing, despairing epic of the soul, 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.