An old-fashioned melodama - Rocco and His Brothers

Lucchino Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers (1955?) is a long and old-fashioned melodrama, largely interesting for a few very powerful scenes and for its overall vision and documentation of postwar urban Italy, still reeling from poverty and ruin. In brief, story involves recently widowed mother and 4 sons who leave small southern town and take a train journey to Milan to join the oldest son who has settled there successfully. The opening sequence is disturbing and kind of hysterical - as the five arrive at brother's small place just as he's gathered with a large group of future in-laws; the family arrives mid-celebration, unannounced, all very poorly planned, and expect to move in right away. Mother and future mother-in-aw get in a screaming match - and oldest son, Vincente, torn between mama and fiancee - a theme for the entire three-hour movie, in which mother is constantly wailing about her boys, who can do no wrong and are beset upon by the world. First half of the movie shows their gradual assimilation into life in Milan, as they move into very crowded public housing, find work in various places (youngest son does not appear to go to school at all). About half-way through the story shifts into a battle between two of the brothers - Rocco and Simone - over the love of a former prostitute. Simone is a professional fighter. In by far the most powerful sequence of the movie, he and a gang of thugs pursue Rocco to a remote water works where he's gone with the girl. Simone rapes her right in front of Rocco, then the two of them engage in a lengthy, and kind of stagey fist fight. Simone continues to deteriorate, Rocco becomes the good brother, devoted to family, and all ends in one of those insane and operatic conclusions with everyone wailing and falling all over each other. In the last sequence, the two youngest brothers meet and reconcile at the fates of an Alfa Romeo plant, where the older works - and at the end we see him ambling back to the factory among a crowd of fellow workers - Visconti's Marxists politics envisioned in a tableau, the opposite of, say, Metropolis - and then the youngest walking alone back toward one of those massive ugly postwar housing complexes on a wide treeless street - someday, we know, to be jammed with traffic but not yet - in a final note that reminds me a little of the end of Der Rosenkavalier, the young boy who, unlike the others, has a whole life in front of him. A pretty good movie but hindered by its own ambitions - it's very hard to tell a tale of (maybe six) distinct characters over quite a long and eventful period of time without spending far too much time on basic exposition. Too much of this movie entails just moving the grand mechanism forward, rather than examining character and emotion.