I admit to being an inveterate TV fan. No wonder when one can view such a film as Arte showed over the weekend: Luchino Visconti's "Rocco and his Brothers". The title is a familiar one from back in my Greenwich Village days. My sister was and still is, a francophile and in love with foreign films, especially French but not me. As a dancer, I usually watched musicals as part of my schooling in the how tos of performing, so I missed this and many other classic films over the years.
Getting back to Rocco, the script with well drawn characters and the actors held me spellbound especially memorable performances by Katina Paxinou, wonderful as the typical mom who rules the brothers, Annie Giradot as the 'devil in spite of herself' making the viewer, me, simultaneously love and hate her and her wanton ways. I yearned to tell Rocco, Alan Delon, not to give her up after his foolish brother shames her and him but helas, he does and honey turns to vinegar. I haven't been a Delon fan but surely if I had seen him long ago in this film I would've been. His performance as Rocco blew me away and his beauty was an added extra.
Sometimes I felt the sexism a bit much but one has to take into consideration the timing and the place : Italy, 1960. If you haven't yet seen this classic masterpiece, I strongly recommend it.
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