There aren’t just two brothers in Luchino Visconti’s classic, but five: Rocco (Alain Delon), Simone (Renato Salvatori), Ciro (Max Cartier), Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi), and Vincenzo (Spiros Focas). They’re country folk who have moved to Milan, only to find their family corrupted and torn apart by the big city.
The most affected are Rocco and Simone, who share both a profession (boxing) and a lover (ex-prostitute Nadia, played by Annie Girardot). But Rocco fights with great reluctance, while Simone turns to brutality all too easily. At one point, he rapes Nadia while forcing Rocco to watch, and he will do even worse to her before the film ends. Ultimately, Simone’s brothers must decide whether to protect him or turn him in to the police, and that conflict tears the family apart for good.
Salvatori was reportedly pugnacious in real life (though he and Girardot fell in love for real and got married); an anecdote from the set has Visconti taking advantage of his temper by making him wait all day for a shot, then telling him the shot had been ruined by a technical glitch and would have to be redone. Visconti then captured the look of frustration on Salvatori’s face as he became so enraged that he punched a wall and broke his wrist. The resulting chemistry, between the volatile, hotheaded Simone and the restrained, sad-eyed Rocco, set up the kind of volatile family dynamic that would echo down the years into Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese’s family dramas.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3tK_13gLDI]