Blood & Brother Love

Rocco and His Brothers (Titanus-Films Marceau; Astor) is an interminable, sprawling, jerkily cut and overpraised melodrama (winner of 22 awards including the Venice Film Festival top prize for 1960) about the troubles of a peasant mother and her five sons who migrate to Milan from a farming village in southern Italy. Its director is Luchino Visconti, a film-struck Roman aristocrat currently revered as one of the triumvirate--along with Federico Fellini (La Strada, La Dolce Vita) and Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Avventura)--which has brought Italian film making out of its mid-fifties doldrums.

The association is largely a journalists' creation. Fellini, 41, and Antonioni, 48, are experimenters whose latest films delicately dissect the effete upper classes. Visconti, who is 55, still concerns himself with peasants and is old-guard; in Rocco he has reverently revived the techniques he and such directors as Rossellini (Open City) and De Sica (The Bicycle Thief) used in the 1940's. Rocco keeps all the bench marks of Italian neo-realism--the urine-streaked tenement walls, the fields full of rubble, the endless squawk of language ("Ecco! Ecco! Basta! Basta!"). And flaring fitfully in the three-hour brawl of exposed frames that Visconti could not bring himself to edit, there is also some of the power of the postwar masterpieces.

The best of Visconti's scenes look honestly at the appalling depths of brother love: two of the brothers quarrel over a girl, and one of them rapes and eventually murders her, yet is forgiven. But the acting is pointlessly, if deliberately, melodramatic; the murderer needlessly apes a silent-film villain--slack jaw, rolling eyes and all. Whole episodes are unprofitably murky. A question at the core of the film --whether corrosive city is preferable to deadening land--is never convincingly asked, although Rocco is supposed to end with its answer. Worst is the endless mayhem. Visconti's camera is a carnivore, stalking for blood and bruised flesh, and the sight is fascinating. But it is like a lion tearing at a zebra: only a spectator with a great hatred for zebras can watch it for long.

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