Joining the tragic exodus of millions from Italy's impoverished south, the formidable matriarch of the Parondi clan (Katina Paxinou, Best Supporting Oscar, For Whom the Bell Tolls) and her brood emerge from Milan's looming Stazione Centrale in search of a better life in the industrial north. But, as they inch up the social ladder, family bonds are ruthlessly shredded, as the love of Alain Delon's saintly Rocco ("one of the most vivid and complex characters in all of Visconti's work" - Vincent Canby) for prostitute Annie Girardot drives brutish boxing sibling Renato Salvatori to rape and murder. Simultaneously a documentation of a changing society; a kind of continuation of Visconti's classic La Terra Trema; an evocation of the works of Sicilian titan Giovanni Verga, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers; and a visual tour de force as lensed by Giuseppe Rotunno (The Leopard, Amarcord, All That Jazz, etc.), Rocco rocketed Delon and Girardot to international stardom and vaulted Visconti to his second triumvirate - here with Antonioni and Fellini - at the cutting edge of Italian filmmaking (his first, with Rossellini and DeSica, in the heyday of neo-realism). The director's personal favorite, Rocco's mix of realism and intense, operatic emotion would profoundly influence the work of Coppola and Scorsese. (Film Forum) "A masterpiece. A film of extraordinary range and ambition...a great story beautifully told, effortlessly tracking dozens of characters across a five-year span of dense incidents." (Dave Kehr, Chicago Tribune)