Considered one of the great lost classics of Italian neo-realism, this bleak drama was the debut feature of filmmaker
Marco Bellocchio.
Lou Castel stars as Alessandro, an epileptic from a large family of similarly afflicted siblings, headed up by a blind matriarch (
Liliana Gerace).
The only healthy member of the family is Alessandro's brother Augusto
(Marino Mase), who wants to marry his girlfriend but refuses to saddle a
bride with the enormous burden of helping to care for his ailing
relatives. Sympathetic to Augusto's plight, Alessandro decides to murder
the rest of the family so as to set his brother free and assure him of
an inheritance. After hurling his mother into a ravine and drowning his
little brother, Alessandro returns home to suffer a seizure. Long hailed
by critics and historians as an unjustly ignored film,
I Pugni in Tasca
(1965) was one of 15 titles selected by New York's Museum of Modern Art
for its "Second Act" retrospective of post-war Italian cinema in the
spring of 2000.
