Rocco e i suoi fratelli
After the death of his father, Rocco Parondi (Alain Delon), one of the five sons of a poor rural Italian family travels north from Lucania to join his older brother Vincenzo in Milan, led by the matriarch Rosaria (Katina Paxinou). She is the "hand to which the five fingers belong" as she states in the film and she has a powerful influence on her sons. Presented in five distinct sections, the film weaves the story of the five brothers Vincenzo, Simone, Rocco, Ciro and Luca Parondi as each of them adapts to his new life in the city.
Vincenzo, the eldest brother, is already living in Milan when his mother and brothers come to join him expecting to move in with him. An initial scene ensues between the Parondi family and Vincenzo's fiancée Ginetta's family, and the whole Parondi family moves in together. Despite early friction between Rosaria and Ginetta, he soon gets married and starts a family of his own. After settling down, Vincenzo doesn't interact much with the Parondi brothers. Simone struggles to adapt to urban life, and the arrival of Nadia (Annie Girardot), a prostitute from Cremona will lead to his tragic downfall. She incites him to pursue a career in boxing as a fast way to reach fame and wealth, which his mother also encourages. After initially pursuing Vincenzo only to find him happy in his new family life, Nadia turns her interest to Simone. Simone falls in love with Nadia and demands for more than a casual relationship, but she rejects him.
Rocco, who left to complete military service in Turin, meets Nadia who has just been released from jail for prostitution charges. His innocence and purity of heart ignites her to give up her old life style and enter an exclusive relationship with him. Upon becoming aware of this, Simone attacks Nadia and Rocco with a gang of friends, culminating in the rape of Nadia by Simone. Rocco subsequently, in an act of sheer sacrifice, tells Nadia to go back to Simone realizing how much he had hurt his brother and how much he loved her, and she reluctantly complies. Somewhat in the manner of Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin character; Rocco often acts to preserve the well-being of family members at some cost to his own happiness. He saves Simone from a variety of disasters, such as when Rocco recovers and returns an expensive brooch that Simone had stolen from his boss in a dry cleaning shop. Ultimately, Simone loses the ability to compete as a boxer because of his obsession with Nadia, his alcoholism, and dissolute lifestyle. He kills her in a jealous fit of rage when she returns to prostitution.
Near the end of the film, Rocco shares an anecdote about stonemasons, who at the start of any building project, throw a stone into the shadow of a passerby in order to symbolize the sacrifice that is needed to erect a structure. Rocco's own habit of sacrificing his money and well-being can be likewise analogized as attempts to preserve his family after their upheaval from country life. Ciro is the second-youngest brother, and perhaps by observing the trials of his elder brothers, decides to learn from their mistakes and mimic his brother Vincenzo. To that end, Ciro becomes engaged to a local woman from a good family and finds steady work in the city at an automobile factory. However, unlike Vincenzo, Ciro participates in family matters, and at the end of the movie, he turns in Simone to the police for murdering Nadia. The youngest brother Luca does little but watch quietly in the background during much of the movie. Despite the fact that Luca had spent the least time in Southern Italy when the family moved to Milan, by the end of the film he is the only brother who wants to return to the country life. In one of the last scenes, Luca speaks to Ciro near a factory and tells him that he will return to the south even if none of the other brothers join him. He is represented as the hope for a more balanced idealised future in which the two worlds will merge in spite of their discrepancies.
romantic, violence, murder, storytelling, melodrama