The Great Movies III

Rocco steps in behind him, starting a liaison with Nadia and also a successful boxing career (which he doesn't even want). But when Simone explodes with grief and jealousy (truly operatic, these scenes), he astonishingly breaks with Nadia, telling her she must return to his brother because "He has only you." Rocco joins the Navy, meets Nadia again by chance in a port city, resumes their romance, and then Simone, in an astonishing scene, gathers a pack of buddies, interrupts the two lovers in a secluded outdoor tryst, attacks and rapes Nadia. It is a cowardly and ruthless act, revealing how shameless he has become, and a scene in which Girardot performs heroically. But this scene, and a later murder scene, aroused the wrath of the Italian censors, who had great difficulties with the film and its seamy portrait of life.

The mother persists in dreaming that her sons will live together under her roof, but Vincenzo marries Ginetta (the result, the matriarch sniffs, of "an unfortunate accident"). Now Rocco leaves home to live with Vincenzo, and Simone moves in-with Nadia, who his mother is expected to shelter and feed, while he hangs out with louts and gets drunk.

Rocco's boxing career advances steadily, even though he despises the sport. Financially, he has little choice but to continue; the others depend on him, and the film makes a point of the serflike living and working conditions in southern Italy, and the steady migration north of those seeking jobs and wages. This theme, too, annoyed the censors, since it was more controversial at the time than it seems now.

Many, maybe most, of the best scenes in the film involve Nadia. She is cruelly abused by her love for Simone, drops from high style to degradation in her career as a prostitute, and her last meeting with Simone cries out for operatic arias to express their feelings. Another great scene comes toward the end, as Ciro, who has a job on the Alfa-Romeo assembly line, speaks with Luca, the youngest brother, of his duty to his family and his ties to the south, a "land of olives, moonshine, and rainbows," where he dreams they will someday return. In memory the south has become less harsh than the land that drove them north.

The film is shot in carefully composed black and white that foregrounds the brothers and Nadia in many shots, showing them listening or reacting to what is happening behind them. If there is a peculiarity of the casting, it is that all five brothers are almost improbably handsomebeginning, of course, with the matinee idol Delon, then at the dawn of his career.

Rocco and His Brothers can be seen quite clearly, at this point, as an enormous influence on great American gangster films. Aspects of The Godfather immediately come into mind. And the critic D. K. Holm observes: "The tense, penitent relationship between Charlie (Harvey Keitel) and Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) in (Scorsese's) Mean Streets is almost unimaginable without the precedence of Rocco and His Brothers." At a very subtle level, the love between the brothers seems almost sexual, as in a late scene where Simone confesses to Rocco and Rocco fights with Ciro and vows to defend him. These feelings are well concealed by the film, but they are there.

There's a great passage near the end, when Rocco has a great triumph on the same night when Simone ruins himself. Two fights, in a sense, are intercut. The neighbors pour out onto the balconies to cheer Rocco as a new champion, and then Simone comes home in wretched defeat to the always forgiving arms of his mother. The way the two story strands come together is manipulative, yes, but deeply effective.

The experience of watching Rocco and His Brothers is rather overwhelming. So much happens, at such intensity and complexity, with such an outpouring of emotion, that we do feel we're witnessing an opera. Like many operas, it has too much melodrama in too little time. That can be exhausting but it can be exhilarating as well.

t is by general agreement the most famous shot in silent comedy: a man in a straw hat and round horn-rimmed glasses, hanging from the minute hand of a clock twelve stories above the city street. Strange, that this shot occurs in a film few people have ever seen. Harold Lloyd's Safety Last (1923), like all of his films, was preserved by the comedian but rarely shown; having been through most of Charlie Chaplin and virtually everything by Buster Keaton, I viewed it for the first time last week, and it was my first Harold Lloyd. Others got their chance, as a retrospective of Lloyd's work, meticulously restored, tours the country in advance of a DVD package.