“Rocco And His Brothers”/”Rocco e i suoi fratelli” (1960)
Perhaps Visconti’s most compellingly accessible film, surely “Rocco and His Brothers” is also his most influential: it’s impossible not to notice the heavy debt owed to it by the “Godfather” films of Francis Ford Coppola and by Scorsese‘s “Raging Bull” in particular. But its canonization as a kind of year-zero for the American independent movement of the 1970s perhaps ignores that the film itself has roots that stretch back a way and even across the Atlantic in the opposite direction: in particular Elia Kazan‘s 1954 “On the Waterfront” seems to feed into this story of five brothers from the poor rural South of Italy trying to make their way in the industrialized, booming North. It’s also the perfect midpoint between the naturalist realism of his early titles and the melodrama of the later, in which the former style adds gravitas and social relevance to the chewy, page-turner entertainment value of the latter. It even marks a distinct step forward from his debut “Ossessione,” where he also attempted this kind of synthesis: while actually running considerably longer, ‘Rocco’ does not suffer from the same pacing issues, and whips by, with individual episodes building toward a truly shocking, provocative climax. Divided into chapters headed after each of the five Parondi brothers, really the film becomes mostly about Simone (a brilliantly bullish and bruised Renato Salvatore) and Rocco (Alain Delon). Simone falls for an improbably beautiful prostitute, Nadia (Anne Girardot), who encourages him to pursue a boxing career. That brings him into corrupting company, and when the purehearted Rocco returns from military service and he and Nadia fall in love, the stage is set for escalating violence. To a modern eye, ‘Rocco’ is problematic in its treatment of Nadia, who is given a great deal of personality to begin with, but is gradually marginalized to the status of a sacrificial lamb in the fraternal tug-of-war, but outside of this issue, ‘Rocco’ is close to genius — a beautiful, scorching, shocking drama that takes on the resonance of a Greek tragedy as five brothers try to negotiate the balance between self-interest and familial loyalty in a city that doesn’t give a damn about any of them.
“The Leopard”/”Il gattopardo” (1963)
While one might disagree with the recent installation of this title as the greatest of all Visconti dramas, there’s no denying the sheer scope of its ambition and the massive, gravitational heft of its themes. “The Leopard,” based on the novel of the same name by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, tackles as its central motif no less a subject than the inevitability of social change over time, and the responsibility of each generation to make way for the next. It’s probably also the film in which he best achieved a synthesis of the micro with the macro, as Burt Lancaster‘s ageing Prince of Salina (the second largest of the Aeolian Islands after Sicily), faces encroaching irrelevance and infirmity at the same time as the anti-monarchist redshirts (under Giuseppe Garibaldi) begin to gain the upper hand in the campaign of 1860 that ultimately leads to the unification of a new, notionally more democratic Italy. But “The Leopard” also feels oddly personal (again the lure of Visconti’s autobiography, with its aristocrat/communist dichotomy becomes irresistible), as the Prince, in so many ways the symbol of an old guard entrenched in hierarchy and tradition, is also shown to have sympathy toward the redshirt cause. In particular, he indulges his handsome if feckless nephew, Tancredi (Alain Delon), who is involved with the rebels, though more for the romance of it than any native idealism. And yet by the end of the film, Tancredi has won not only the hand of the beautiful Angelica (Claudia Cardinale), for whom the old man himself nurses a passion, he has remade himself into the kind of pragmatic New Man that the Prince may not admire, but must ruefully cede the future to. With the last third of this long film taking place at one lavish ball as the Prince moves from room to room, increasingly at odds with the gossip and gaiety of the doomed class he represents, despite its position in the early-middle of Visconti’s feature career, it feels like a farewell: an extended, protracted, painful goodbye to a way of life that has its own beauty and nobility but cannot, and should not, survive.
“The Damned”/”La caduta degli dei (Götterdämmerung)” (1969)
There’s some debate as to which film we should classify as the “best” of Visconti’s technicolor dramas, but there’s a small minority — okay there’s one, me — who thinks the needle should tend away from the stateliness of “The Leopard” and point straight at the absolutely bonkers “The Damned.” In fact, there are at least two of us — the film was also the single favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s (our retro here), which, if you’ve seen any of his movies, makes an awful lot of sense. Shifting his historical focus away from the Risorgimento period of Italian history and taking in instead the pre-war rise of Nazism in Germany, Visconti again creates a parable of doomed decadence by focusing on one high-society family, in this case the von Essenbeck clan, who derive their wealth and influence from a steelworks empire. Prior to his murder and the takeover of the business by Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), the social-climbing lover of his widowed daughter Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), the old Baron had done equitable business with the Nazis. But in the person of SS Officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), the Party sees an opportunity after his death to gain full control of the steelworks they need for their massive remilitarization programme. Maneuvering the family members along the faultlines of their myopic internal jealousies and deviances, Aschenbach emerges as the film’s puppeteer, but it’s Martin (Helmut Berger), Sophie’s cross-dressing, child-molesting, incestuous son who emerges as its most unforgettable character (Umberto Orsini and Charlotte Rampling also feature as the family’s only “good” members, who naturally pay the ultimate price for their relative decency). This is an extraordinarily lurid film, even brushing against real historical events by staging the so-called “Night of the Long Knives” as a gay Nazi orgy that turns abruptly into a Sam Peckinpah-style bloodbath. But the inherent camp of a lot of the imagery, and even the occasionally gaudy, crash-zoom filmmaking somehow builds to a truly remarkable piece of work, a film that embodies Visconti’s recurrent themes of self-defeat and self-loathing (especially for the reactionary, self-interested upper classes) possibly better than any other of his titles. This is a portrait of decadence leading to personal and public moral decay so absolute it’s practically apocalyptic, which might seem overwrought if we knew nothing of the absolute moral apocalypse that was to come in the form of World War II.