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+---- Thread: Rocco and His Brothers (1960)[Italian] by Luchino Visconti (/showthread.php?tid=6601)
Rocco and His Brothers (1960)[Italian] by Luchino Visconti - cranefly - 10-27-2021
[seen on Kanopy]
An inpoverished mother moves north with her five sons hoping to give them better job prospects. They eventually do find jobs. Rocco (Alain Delon) finds work at a dry cleaners, and the others find similar little jobs. Simone is rather problematic. He becomes a boxer, does well in the ring at first, but gets beaten down over time and develops bad habits. Rocco is ever having to bail him out of trouble. Eventually Simone's problems become so serious that Rocco must enter the boxing world (with a face like that, of course Delon is a boxing natural!) under a long contract in hopes of clearing Simone's debts. He takes a drubbing inside the ring, but eeks out victories with sudden haymakers. Outside the ring he takes a dubbing, because this is an Italian film, and Delon is French.
Why did I watch this? I wanted my Delon fix and had heard great things about this. It's a wonderful movie, but not quite my cup of tea, and Delon isn't quite as magical because he's dubbed, or maybe because he's too short in the tooth and hasn't fully come into his own.
A better Delon vehicle is La Piscine (The Swimming Pool). Therein he spends most of his time lazing about a swimming pool while on vacation in the French Riviera. Interestingly, Delon conditioned his involvement in this vehicle on having Romy Schneider play his significant other. They had been married in real life several years before, and this was a wonderful opportunity to see them reunited in intimate roles.
There is drama in La Piscine. I don't want to give the impression that nothing happens, because it does, and there's a low and growing tension throughout that eventually leads somewhere. But even as Delon lazes about that pool, doing next to nothing, he is riveting to watch.
I could spend all day just watching Delon watch Nicole Kidman brush her teeth.