A masterpiece with a terrible legacy...

Author: Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) from Toronto, Ontario, Canada
13 March 2006
I could kick myself for not having seen this film before now (on French Ontario television, in the shortened 168 minute French version). It is a wonderful Italian family epic explaining, in Marxist terms, the effect on a southern rural family of a move to the big northern city of Milan. The contrast between a violent brother (Simone) and his saintly counterpart (Rocco) gives rise to the tragedy which everybody else must pay for.

The film has a great theme, great direction, great acting and a truly memorable and heart-rending score by Nino Rota. It reaches the heights of Shakespearean drama and of course outdoes it in realism. But what I discovered by seeing this film so late is that it is also partly responsible for the seedier aspects of the careers of Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola who naturally tried to emulate their hero Visconti by adapting his themes to American reality. This has unfortunately had the side-effect of creating a monster of a melodrama called "The Godfather" which became an ode to violence and organized crime and a boxing-themed film like "Raging Bull" which further contributed to lower the bar of graphic violence on the screen.

Hell, Coppola even borrowed the services of Nino Rota for the film and its sequel... I admire "Rocco" but I still think the world would have been better off without "The Godfather" and "Raging Bull" (among other violent films of the second part of the last century). "Rocco" is available on DVD in America in its cut 168 minute Italian version in non-anamorphic widescreen (1.66:1) with English subtitles, which is unfortunate for us Francophones as the French version is just as legitimate as the Italian one and features Delon's, Girardot's, Salvatori's and Hanin's real voices. It deserves an uncut edition and the full Criterion treatment.