Word: viscontis
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...human statement that goes beyond vignette or myth to the difficult realm of life. Occasionally marred by over-emphasized symbolism and over-played brutality, Rocco subjects one to the ordeals of its creator, and in so doing escapes the usual pitfalls of social realism. It is as if Luchino Visconti (who wrote and directed) were, in one grueling gasp, saying "No, not all poor people are victimized saints; not all city life; yes, tragedy results from human weakness and conflicting desires, including the desire to hurt others...
...Astor) is an interminable, sprawling, jerkily cut and overpraised melodrama (winner of 22 awards including the Venice Film Festival top prize for 1960) about the troubles of a peasant mother and her five sons who migrate to Milan from a farming village in southern Italy. Its director is Luchino Visconti, a film-struck Roman aristocrat currently revered as one of the triumvirate-along with Federico Fellini (La Strada, La Dolce Vita) and Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura)-which has brought Italian film making out of its mid-fifties doldrums...
...association is largely a journalists' creation. Fellini, 41, and Antonioni, 48, are experimenters whose latest films delicately dissect the effete upper classes. Visconti, who is 55, still concerns himself with peasants and is old-guard; in Rocco he has reverently revived the techniques he and such directors as Rossellini (Open City) and De Sica (The Bicycle Thief) used in the 1940's. Rocco keeps all the bench marks of Italian neo-realism-the urine-streaked tenement walls, the fields full of rubble, the endless squawk of language ("Ecco! Ecco! Basta! Basta!"). And flaring fitfully in the three-hour...
...best of Visconti's scenes look honestly at the appalling depths of brother love: two of the brothers quarrel over a girl, and one of them rapes and eventually murders her, yet is forgiven. But the acting is pointlessly, if deliberately, melodramatic; the murderer needlessly apes a silent-film villain-slack jaw, rolling eyes and all. Whole episodes are unprofitably murky. A question at the core of the film -whether corrosive city is preferable to deadening land-is never convincingly asked, although Rocco is supposed to end with its answer. Worst is the endless mayhem. Visconti's camera...
...proud city-states of Italy, none was more arrogant or belligerent than Milan, the rich capital of Lombardy. The names of its militant warlords, the Visconti and the Sforza, sent chills down the spine of Italy. But in art, Milan has always been looked down upon as a poor cousin by such sophisticated citadels as Venice and Florence. Even today most tourists take a look at the towered Duomo (second largest cathedral in Italy), seek out the faded mural remains of The Last Supper (painted by an imported Florentine, Leonardo da Vinci) at Santa Maria delle Grazie, and hurry...