Rocco e i suoi fratelli [Rocco and his Brothers] (1960)

(On TV, October 2022) I’d love to hit Rocco and his Brothers with the same insouciance that I use to dismiss Italian neorealism, except for one thing: If this is a portrayal of reality, then things were downright unbearable in circa-1960s Italy. I kid, but: this is pure melodrama with heightened stakes, whether we’re talking about the family moving from rural south Italy to the urban north, the five (count’em: five!) brothers all with their own distinct personalities, the prostitute that goes for a few of them, the boxing career subplot, or the mean deaths that await some of the characters. Alain Delon may be pretty good as the titular Rocco, but the rest of the film is just one thing after another—barely believable as soap opera material, but here presented as a grand statement. (Yes, I’m aware the film pops up on “1000 movies to see before you die,” lists and that its writer-director Luchino Visconti is acclaimed as a great director. I just don’t care.)  To be fair, I could have predicted this exact reaction about thirty seconds in the film—a black-and-white Italian drama made between 1945 and 1965? Yeah, that’s going into the same bucket, no matter whether it’s neorealist or melodramatic.