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Rating: "The story of a mother and her children: five like the fingers of a hand"
This is Visconti's idea for this film: to tell this family story, of familial decline, of a southern family group in Milan.
The story, which unfolds in 5 acts as many as there are brothers, shows the Parondi family, with the Great Widow Mother Rosaria as the head, who moves from Lucania to Milan, where the eldest Vincenzo was already living.
The mother bursts into the boy's engagement party compromising the celebration and ruining the engagement and his emancipation, as now that the father has died, he must think of the family.
The family settles in a basement in Lambrate, where the boys try to find some occupation and where they meet the prostitute Nadia (Annie Girardot) and become interested in boxing. Simone (Renato Salvatori) thus begins to succeed as a boxer, assisted by Rocco, but to win over Nadia, he starts stealing and the woman, bored of him, leaves him. Rocco (Alain Delon), during military service, meets Nadia just out of prison and they return to Milan. The two fall in love and Nadia changes her life, starting to study.
When Simone learns of their relationship, he beats his brother bloody and rapes Nadia in front of him. Rocco, believing to win over Simone's love, leaves a desperate Nadia. Meanwhile, the latter, abandoning himself to a life of vice, contracts several debts to the point of succumbing to his coach's advances, who reports him for theft: Rocco, to avoid prison for his brother, decides to return to boxing to pay his brother's debts, who spends his days in debauchery accompanied by Nadia, drunk and devastated by Rocco's abandonment, who after a quarrel with the widow escapes home.
In the meantime, the second to last brother, Ciro, who has found an honest job studying, kicks Simone out of the house and he, knowing that Nadia has resumed prostituting at the Idroscalo, reaches her to get her back. When the woman screams her disgust in his face, he kills her with stab wounds.
Meanwhile, Rocco has become a boxing star and celebrations are held at home: the mother is over the moon since her family has established itself, and now they call her Madam. At that moment, Simone arrives who confesses the murder and despair bursts in the house: Ciro wants to kick him out but Rocco and the others want to protect and hide him.
Despite this, Simone is arrested and Ciro tries to educate the youngest brother Luca to a new perspective on life and new values.
Visconti, in the construction of this splendid film, one of the best Italian films, draws from various sources: from Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann, which tells the exodus of a family and also the relationship of two civilizations, two different cultures: the southern one made up of archaic, irrational, primitive passions and a very tight family bond described by Verga and the squalid Milanese suburbs of Testori, from which the passage of the bridge to Ghisolfa is derived.
Visconti gives a new image to the Milanese background as it appears to immigrants: grey, leaden, completely enveloped in fog, with a light dense of vapor without shadows and shows how traditional family ties, millenary bonds dissolve and lead to moral decline where there is confusion between the responsibilities and duties of the individual and those of the family network.
Another inspiration comes from Dostoevsky with his characters who cannot redeem themselves from their destiny like Nadia and Simone (portrayed by a great Annie Girardot and a good Renato Salvatori, who will fall in love on set and end up marrying and spending their lives together) or the continuous goodness and kindness of Rocco (Alain Delon in splendid form, perfect acting) and with the idea that economic growth without moral support makes its enjoyment impossible: indeed in the instant the family reaches the maximum economic well-being it collapses.
The film is constructed like a novel with 5 chapters that show the different attitudes of these boys who came from tradition in contact with modernity: there is Vincenzo who wants to close every relationship with his homeland and integrate into the city by marrying his girlfriend (Claudia Cardinale) to lead a tranquil, mundane life and always depicted in small, cramped spaces like his aspirations, unlike the open places of Rocco and Simone.
Simone represents a classic type of Italian arrogant, defiant, a bit rude and possessive (his story indeed begins when he throws punches for boxing) but behind this facade of arrogance hides a small, insecure man, a child. Rocco, trying to be kind, in a somewhat naive way ends up bringing ruin, conceives the family as a solid block of marble, does not love Milan, would like to return to his village, and is defeated, ending his days doing a job (the boxer) that he does not love, sacrificing himself for the family. Ciro, instead, seems to represent the way of thinking of modernity, where everyone is responsible for what they do, expecting a renewal of traditional values even though he also seems to slide into the banality of the bourgeoisie (with his girlfriend and a somewhat superficial thought), while Luca perhaps represents the future, a big question mark.
I've already gone on quite a bit but I wanted to add that the beauty of this film is especially encased in its atmospheres: in these extreme passions, these red and black feelings that unfold in these magnificent shots of Milan and its lines (the scene at the Idroscalo is stunning) and some images now vanished (one above all the Bretagne hotel in Bellagio now in complete decay); in the use of black and white and in some camera cuts aimed at emphasizing the internal contrasts of the film and in our soul.
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