Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
When a impoverished widow’s family moves to the big city, two of her five sons become romantic rivals with deadly results.
Visconti's sprawling neorealist epic delivers genuinely powerful dramatic writing with its multi-chapter examination of a southern Italian family's disintegration under the pressures of modernity and urban poverty. The acting — particularly Alain Delon and Renato Salvatori — is raw and magnetic. The black-and-white cinematography by Giuseppe Rotunno is stunning, with chiaroscuro compositions of operatic intensity. The film's novelty is solid but not exceptional — it works within the neorealist tradition Visconti helped establish, and its episodic family-tragedy structure has identifiable antecedents. The ending, while emotionally heavy and thematically coherent, feels somewhat extended and melodramatically overwrought in its final stretch, preventing it from landing with the clean force its ambitions suggest.