The Great Movies III

Films have grown so aggressive and jittery that it takes patience to calm down into one like The River. Its most dramatic moment takes place offscreen. Renoir is not interested in emotional manipulation but in regarding lives as they are lived. Not everyone we like need be successful, and not everyone we dislike need fail. All will be sorted out in the end-or perhaps not, which is also the way time passes and lives resolve themselves.

Nothing is really finished at the end of The River. Despite Jane Austen's insistence that a man like Captain John "must be in want of a wife," he is still in want as the film ends. Harriet has not yet grown up. Melanie has still not found a place for herself. Renoir's way of bringing his story to a conclusion is a form of understated poetry. All three girls receive letters from Captain John. All three open them and begin to read them while sitting on the steps, and then from within the house comes a baby's cry. The nanny emerges to announce: "It's a girl!" And the three girls jump up and rush into the house, the letters fluttering forgotten to the ground behind them.

uchino Visconti was a man of many tempers, styles, and beliefs, and you can see them all, fighting for space, on the epic canvas of his masterpiece, Rocco and His Brothers (1960). Visconti (1906-76) was gay, an aristocrat, a Marxist, a director of theater and opera. He was a key influence in Italian neorealism and later abandoned it to make movies of elaborate style and fantasy. He loved the subject of decadence, and yet Rocco is profoundly idealistic. As an aristocrat himself, he had a love of tradition that showed in his great film The Leopard (1962), although that film was about the slow dying of aristocracy.

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. We buy the whole overwrought package, the quiet truth, the flamboyant excess, even the undercurrent of homoeroticism that Visconti never quite reconciles. The excitement of the film is that so much is happening, in so many different ways, all struggling to find a fusion.

The film is an epic involving modern Italian history. In Milan one cold winter right arrives the Parondi family. Mother Rosaria (Katina Paxinou) apprehensively shepherds four of her five sons from the rail station. They are Simone (Renato Salvatori), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). They're on their way to the meet oldest son, Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), who has already established himself in Milan.

Their timing couldn't be worse. It is the night of Vincenzo's engagement party to the beautiful Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), in whose home he has been made welcome. But the two mothers take an instant dislike to each other, the Parondis stalk out, and Vincenzo's engagement is temporarily broken. What follows is the most neorealist segment of the movie, as mother and sons move into a bleak basement flat and are overjoyed one morning when it is snowing, because that means work shoveling the streets.

Their living quarters improve. A friend advises them to rent an apartment, any apartment, simply to pay the rent for a few months, then stop paying, and get evicted. That way they can find public housing. It is not available, of course, to those who are homeless in the first place: "You have to be evicted." Soon they're living in spartan but spacious and clean public housing, courtesy of the socialist government, and the sons are finding their way in the world.

They meet a neighbor who is to profoundly affect the lives of the family. This is the prostitute Nadia, played by Annie Girardot, who for me creates the best performance in the film. Young, cheerful, and honest, she appeals immediately to both Simone and Rocco, although Rocco conceals his feelings and doesn't make a move until two years after Nadia and Simone have broken up.

Meanwhile, Simone is spotted as promising by a boxing promoter, a snaky and sexually ambivalent man who signs him to a contract and later invites Rocco to get into the ring as well. Simone has some success with his early fights, but is already on the road to self-destruction when he visits a laundry where Rocco has a job, and steals a shirt "just to wear for a day," he boldly tells the laundry owner when he returns it. He wanted to impress Nadia during a trip to the seaside, and she is sunny and lovely that day, and wholly sympathetic. It is Simone who turns bad, filled with low self-esteem, proud of his wins but negligent of his training-smoking and drinking too much, and finally losing both Nadia and his boxing career.