Episode 11: Halls on Film Episode 11 - Rocco and his Brothers & Iphigenia

We'll begin with Rocco, and I guess this is the better-known film, although I hadn't seen it before, and I don't think you'd seen it before, or had you?

I'd not seen it before, I'd heard a lot about it.

I mean, Coppola mentions it in interviews, so does Scorsese and various others.

It's certainly got a reputation that goes before it.

So this is a three-hour drama from 1960.

It deals with the lives of five brothers who, with their mother, come up from Sicily, the impoverished island of Sicily, and resettle in Milan, in urban Milan, a prosperous northern city.

The first of the brothers goes ahead of them, and the others, along with their mother, joins them later.

And the film is divided into a series of episodes, each of which is named after one of the five brothers.

Rocco is the central brother.

The order follows roughly, I think, the age of the central characters.

The two principal brothers that the film is concerned with are Simone, who's played by Renato Salvatore, and Rocco, the middle brother played by Alain Delon.

who I'm assuming is dubbed in what is an Italian language film.

And this was one of the films that made Delon's career, made him into a star.

And there is also a small part played by Claudia Cardinale as the wife of the eldest brother.

The central thread of the story involves the relationship between two of the brothers, Simone, played by Renato Salvatore, a boxer who takes up with a prostitute, Nadia, played by Annie Shirada.

That relationship goes sour, and then Nadia transfers her affections to Rocco, who is reluctantly drawn into the fight game, and the relationship between the two brothers sours and becomes violent over essentially the... continued possessiveness of Simone towards Nadia.

There are climactic scenes that take place that perhaps we shouldn't give away because there are key developments in the plot.