Arriving at the end of the neorealism movement in Italian cinema, Rocco and His Brothers (1960) was Luchino Visconti's most ambitious production to date and a personal favorite among his many films. Recounting the tale of a widow, Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), and her five sons - Rocco (Alain Delon), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier), Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi) and Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), Visconti paints a sprawling canvas that tells several stories. At the center is the Parondi family, poor Italians from the south who have moved north to Milan in search of a better life. As they adapt to new jobs and relationships, these simple country people are inevitably corrupted by the city.

The emotional range of Rocco and His Brothers is excessive and theatrical like a Verdi opera and often plays like a modern-day Greek tragedy, particularly in its depiction of the relationship between the good son, the saint-like Rocco, and his brutal sibling, Simone, a promising boxer whose downward spiral ends in total degradation (his arrest for the brutal stabbing death of his prostitute lover, Nadia (Annie Girardot).

Excerpt from TCM located HERE

The last gasp of the neo-realist spirit in Visconti's work, Rocco chronicles at length the misfortunes that befall an Italian peasant family when they move to The Big City. There's a grey conviction about much of the scene-setting and the location shooting, but the film gathers interest as it escalates into melodrama; the tragic climax is pure opera. Delon is unconvincing as the saintly Rocco, but Renato Salvatori makes the thuggish elder brother who falls in with a gay boxing promoter his best part ever.

Excerpt from Time Out Film Guide located HERE