I just watched a DVD of Visconti's The Damned [La Caduta degli Dei] over the weekend, after having recently rewatched Death in Venice and The Leopard [Il Gattopardo]. I've never seen Rocco. Should I?
To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.
I just watched a DVD of Visconti's The Damned [La Caduta degli Dei] over the weekend, after having recently rewatched Death in Venice and The Leopard [Il Gattopardo]. I've never seen Rocco. Should I?
Ma certo, caro! "Rocco" is considered the last (and by some, the best) of his "neo-realist" films. The story of a Southern Italian family's stress and disintegration after migration to Milan in the post-war boom, it has been called "the Italian 'Grapes of Wrath.'"
Visconti as you know has a claim to authoring the first "neo-realist" film in 1942, Ossessione, based on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett made an excellent Hollywood version with John Garfield and Lana Turner in 1946, but Visconti's pirated, Italian adaptation is even better). I also recommend his La terra trema, although that story about Sicilian fisherman shot in the Sicilian dialect is more of an "acquired taste."
"Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! Marchons! Marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!"
I guess I'm excited to find fans of good Italian cinema here, so here's also a clip from another movie by a great Italian neo-realist, the "leading man" turned actor, Vittorio De Sica. This movie, I bambini ci guardano [The children are watching us], a domestic drama about the break-up of a young family and its effect on a young child, Pricò, was filmed the summer of 1942, just before the onset of the first major Allied air raids on Italy. It was also the first major collaboration between De Sica and his screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, which was later to bear fruit in the greatest of all Italian films, Ladri di biciclete [Bicycle thieves]. In this scene, Papa is leaving Pricò at boarding school after Mama has run off with Roberto - he pleads with Father to assume a "quasi-paternal" role towards Pricò, and when told everyone is "just like a family" at the school, replies, "That's what he needs: a family."
"Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! Marchons! Marchons! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons!"