Alain Delon is coltishly beautiful in this compelling 1960s tale of homesickness, aspiration, anguish and rage

‘If only we had never left home … but it was our destiny.” The speaker is Rocco, played by Alain Delon – coltishly beautiful and yet innocently sensitive as he perhaps never would be again – in Luchino Visconti’s operatically magnificent family epic from 1960. The original music is by Nino Rota, but you can imagine Verdi or Puccini wanting to score this movie, especially in the crazed and self-hating anguish of its final scenes.

Veteran Greek actor Katina Paxinou plays ageing widow Rosaria; she is originally from southern Italy and after the death of her husband, exhausted by decades of backbreaking agricultural toil, has come to Milan with four of her five sons, looking for an aspirational new start in the prosperous north. These are tough, slovenly Simone (Renato Salvatori), serious Ciro (Max Cartier), the youngest Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi) and of course Rocco himself. Their other brother Vincenzo (Spiros Focás) is already there, engaged to Ginetta (Claudia Cardinale), whose parents are nakedly hostile to this entire, uncouth southern clan suddenly turning up and showing every sign of wanting charity. But Rosario and her boys get social housing; Ciro gets a job with Alfa Romeo, Luca as a grocer’s delivery boy, Rocco gets a job in an ultra-modern dry cleaner’s and Simone fatefully tries his luck as a boxer.