Critics reviews

The interplay between black-and-white neorealist visuals and melodramatically passionate characters leads to a dance between the grounded and the operatic, and Nino Rota’s sumptuous score so impressed Francis Ford Coppola that he hired him for The Godfather.

It’s a lasting tribute to Visconti, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, and other members of the creative team that an unblinking sense of moment-to-moment verisimilitude shimmers through scene after scene, punctuated with enough grim violence to set the censors squawking even before its official debut.

At just under three hours, Rocco and His Brothers is undoubtedly an epic: a swooning family tragedy about the corruptive and de-humanising effects of capitalism and the personal desolation it can result in. By finally joining the operatic with the neo-realist, Visconti made the quintessential Italian film.

The tussle between neorealism and quasi-operatic melodrama that runs through so much of Visconti's work reaches it apogee in the near-on three hours of Rocco and His Brothers...If there's a prime weakness, it focuses on Delon; not only does Rocco seem too virtuous to be true, but the actor's refined good looks make him an unlikely peasant, and downright unconvincing as the champion boxer he becomes.

[Rocco and His Brothers] still retains an electrifying homoerotic edge... It’s a dense, sober movie and a demanding watch – two parts neorealism to one part grand opera – that sometimes borders on the hysterically overemotional but will be rewarded by repeat viewings.

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.

Visconti's smoldering neorealist epic—clearly an inspiration to Scorsese, from outstanding fight scenes and sibling tension to ominous storefronts and urban throngs, among others—follows the poor Sicilian Parondi family's search for a better life in the northern Italian city of Milan.

Rocco and His Brothers constitutes Visconti's last tussle with neorealism. In its expansiveness and novelistic focus on character and environment at a time of national transition, it looks forward to his 1963 masterpiece The Leopard, but played for passionate intensity instead of a luxurious passivity.

The film is less progressive than L'Avventura; Antonioni's film insists that masculine hierarchies are the persona non grata of Western civilization, and have historically emptied cultures and societies of their potentially humanist convictions. Nevertheless, Visconti's points are just as vital, and his vision perhaps clearer, about violence being bred from systemic blind spots.

What tended to do [Visconti] in was tastefulness, and thankfully ROCCO AND HIS BROTHERS is tasteless and the better--and freer--for it; it has neither the tastefulness of being short (it's almost three hours long), nor the tastefulness of being melancholic, nor even the tastefulness to restrain Visconti's decadent fetishization of impoverished toughness... What he sets out to do in ROCOO AND HIS BROTHERS is subversive in its odd, aristocratic way: to create a beggar's opera.

Looked at today, Rocco's essaying of heroic tropes is particularly trenchant as a dark, devastating critique of masculinity.

The word "operatic" is often overused, but no other would apply to "Rocco and His Brothers." It is a combination that should not work, but does, between operatic melodrama and seamy social realism, which at no point in its 177-minute running time seem to clash, although they should... The excitement of the film is that so much is happening, in so many different ways, all struggling to find a fusion.