In 1960, Rocco and His Brothers was cut by 30 minutes for U.S. release. Following its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival this fall, the completely restored, three-hour version of this masterpiece of world cinema allows us to savor the genius of Visconti in one of his earliest and key family sagas. The neorealist of La terra trema and the opera impresario are both in evidence here: Rocco and His Brothers is at once lyrical and brutal, fatalist film noir expressed in a kind of purity of vision which, like the saintly Rocco himself, it takes a lot of violence to begin to daunt. This Prince Mishkin-like character (Alain Delon) is the anomaly among the five sons of a poor but canny widow (Katina Paxinou) who brings her family to Milan from the south, where they "arrive like an earthquake," unprepared for the strains of urban living. The film develops in five episodes, one devoted to each brother, but the structure is as complex as their lives are intertwined with one another. Delon in his finest role, and Annie Girardot as the prostitute who takes the fall for the saint, validate Visconti's view that "an expression of the burden of being human is the only thing that really counts on the screen."