Luchino Visconti's epic 1960 family portrait marked the director's transition from dour neo-realism to baroque melodrama. A violent parable investigating the effects of industrialization and rural displacement, Rocco and His Brothers follows five siblings from the Italian countryside as they struggle to adjust to life in the big city. Critics have noted the film's influence on the Godfather trilogy — Nino Rota's soundtrack and the characters' don't-take-sides-against-the-family principles in particular — but Visconti's flair for hysterical emotion and lurid excess also feels spiritually akin to the high-art soap operas of Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Todd Haynes.