Fists in the Pocket (1965) User Reviews

What torture, living in this house!

[lastliberal · 8/10 · 6 December 2008]

This first effort by writer/director Marco Bellocchio has been called a drama by some, and a horror film by others. It is both. It is neither.

It is a view of a dysfunctional family. I almost had the impression they cam from a long line of incest like The People Under the Stairs. One wants to get away, another has epilepsy, the mother is blind, one seems to be developmentally disabled, and the last, Giulia (Paola Pitagora)is really not classifiable, but she sure seems to spend a lot of time very close to her brother Ale (Lou Castel).

Ale feels sorry for his older brother, Augusto (Marino Masé) and hatches a plan to drive the rest of the family, including himself off a cliff so his brother can get on with his life.

His plan fails, so he starts doing them in one by one.

Watching him is mesmerizing. You just have to see what he is going to try next. In the meantime, the family just acts as crazy as you would expect.

Bellocchio went on to direct many more great films including A Leap in the Dark, The Prince of Homburg, and The Religion Hour. It is amazing his first was so good.

Dark and wonderful

[mikeburdick · 8/10 · 15 October 2015]

The Sixties was a time of breaking rules and exploring social themes and political ideas that weren't allowed to be expressed in the repressive Fifties. It was a Golden Era of Italian cinema, producing Antonioni's, Visconti's and Fellini's best films, along with so many gems like Olmi's "Il Posto", Germi's "Divorce: Italian Style" and Monicelli's "The Organiser." "Fists in the Pocket" stands out for its dark subject matter, which examines the mind of a sociopath.

While this was not new ground—Clouzot's "Diabolique", Clement's "Purple Noon", Powell's "Peeping Tom" and Hitchcock's more lurid "Psycho" allowed us into the head of a killer—"Fists in the Pocket" portrays a much more nuanced character. What those films don't spend a lot of time on is the motivation behind their characters' actions, outside of their own amoral nature or perhaps some hinted trauma. In this film, while we certainly don't sympathise with the characters' actions, we clearly understand their motivations.

The protagonist of the film is Sandro, but I'd argue that the main character is the family, since it's the family dynamic that drives all action in the film. Sandro and two of his three siblings have varying degrees of epilepsy, and all three grown children live with and care for their blind mother. There's a definite sense of claustrophobia and dread in this family, who all seem trapped by their own love for each other. Their desire to break free of their mother's control and the burden of caring for each other leads to plans being hatched and tragic consequences.

It's quite an oddball story, almost Lynchian, but what makes the characters so utterly believable is the unpredictability of their behaviour, along with some excellent acting, particularly by Lou Castel, who allows us to see into his mind without saying a word. Add to that a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and absolutely sublime photography—it's one of those rare films where you can frame almost every shot—and you've got one of the standout films from a standout period of filmmaking.

God Awful Experience!

[Hitchcoc · 9/10 · 23 May 2016]

My signature uses the words "God Awful Experience." This film with its unraveling psychosis is hard to watch, but it's principle character is simply necessary to draw out the sickness of all the participants. A young man, prone to epileptic seizures, is truly psychotic. He is bored and sees life as quite hopeless. In his nihilistic, existential angst, he has little trouble murdering his mother whom he sees as a nuisance, a distraction, and a pest. He wants some kind of autonomy. There is fratricide and incest and other horrible realities in this film. Killing seems somewhat easy, though hiding the act is not easy. The perpetrator is not able to achieve satisfaction. There is something pretty Freudian here (perhaps counter-Freudian). One strength is that while we have no idea what will happen next and there is no natural flow to this, we can't take our eyes off the movie. If you want something to challenge your senses, take a gander at this film.

A masterpiece!

[Maciste_Brother · 10/10 · 21 November 2000]

The first time I saw Fists in the Pocket, I was 7 or 8 years old and I thought the film was a horror movie because of its gruesome subject matter. It had freaked me a lot then. Today, after viewing it for the first time in its entirety, and though I don't think the film can be considered to be an all and out horror flick, I still think there's enough gruesome and eerie qualities to this drama to call it an authentic neo-horror film. A horror film with intelligence. Unlike Hitchcock (no, I'm not saying his films aren't intelligent) or the plethora of other less subtle horror films, where the horror or terror is mostly obvious and played for thrills to manipulate an audience, in Fists the disturbing aspects aren't played out for thrills. They're there to show the sad situation in which the characters exist. Because of this, the film has a true morbid atmosphere, quasi-Gothic in nature, that permeates it from beginning to end. The characters inability to see the horrifying things they do or think (for most part of the narrative) makes this film absolutely unique in film history. It's a vivid "intimate" portrait of a dysfunctional family that's almost a cerebral horror film.

Simply put, it's brilliant!

The actors are all excellent but Lou Castel's performance as the frustrated, crazed, death obsessed brother is mesmerizing. You can't take your eyes off him. And even though it was made in 1965, the film feels contemporary, mainly because of its refusal to amplify and exploit it shocking aspects or the characters' foibles to heights of schlock or melodrama. Plus, the fluid direction gives this morbid drama (which could have easily been heavy and static) a deceptively "normal" quality which works perfectly and adds even more to all of the characters' sad state of mind. The film is equally claustrophobic and expansive; claustrophobic with the (very) tight interiors and the family drama that (like one of the characters of the film wants to do) makes you want to break free and escape at all cost; and expansive because of the Italian countryside that surrounds these doomed characters. The scenery, natural and man-made, is a character of its own, seemingly symbolizing the characters precipitous existence but also overwhelmingly vast, stark and crushing, dwarfing the already tightly-knit family down to minuscule size, which then heightens their already claustrophobic existence that much more. Ennio Morricone's score is characteristically moody & chilling and complements the film perfectly.

Fists in the Pocket is a very earthy, grounded, morbid & blunt portrait of a doomed family! A must-see for those who love "pure" cinema.

One Fist in his Pocket, the Other in Your Stomach

[debblyst · 10/10 · 10 September 2007]

There had never been a film quite like 'Fist" before. Marco Bellocchio's exasperating, ground-breaking, virtuoso family drama/existential tragedy/black comedy/ horror film is unclassifiable and brilliant -- an artistic and technical triumph. It's a corrosive depiction of a rotting, dysfunctional family being literally led to extinction (or rather to deaths by coups de grace) like a deteriorating, cancerous organism. Bellocchio grabs you by the collar to make you watch the agonizing putrefaction of a formerly well-off but now impoverished, demented, degenerated clan along with the fossilized Catholic rural bourgeoisie values they stand for.

Thus, we meet the doomed family -- the blind, powerless, quasi-mummified Mother (the Father is never mentioned, we assume he's dead) and her four children with Imperial names: there's Augusto, the eldest, tyrannical, insensitive, pathologically selfish, now the patriarch of the family, who plans to get away from their decadent house (Bellocchio's real family house near Piacenza) by taking whatever's left of the family money, marrying socialite Lucia and moving into town. There's Leone, the youngest, a harmless, dependent, mentally impaired epileptic who's rejected by everyone in the family but utters the sanest line in the movie ("What torture, living in this house!"). There's Giulia, the beautiful, narcissistic, inconsequential, prank-loving ragazza who just can't get enough love from her brothers. And there's Alessandro, the central character, an epileptic, tormented, anguished, angry young man who's so bipolar he's alternately called Ale and Sandro, torn apart by hatred and self-hatred, insecurity, sense of uselessness, sloth and an incestuous fixation on sister Giulia. Ale finally concludes that the best way to end all this mess is killing off all the family members (including himself), with the exception of Augusto, the only one in their degenerate caste with apparent "normality" and sufficiently "elastic" morality to join (i.e., become a parasite in) another caste by marrying modern, urban petty bourgeois Lucia.

Though "Fist" still stands very tall 4 decades later, it's makes one wonder what a revolutionary shocker it must have been when it first came out. Alessandro turns upside down the quintessential principles of European Catholic civilization: family love and unity (Alessandro hates and plans to kill his family); respect for the saintly Mother (he simulates slapping her and punching her in the face until he finally murders her, which is more like euthanasia); respect for the ancestors (he literally stomps on a family portrait): the Catholic sacraments (check the startling wake scene, where Alessandro nonchalantly rests his feet on the coffin with his mother's corpse, which certainly inspired the unforgettable Brando wake scene in Bertolucci's "Last Tango in Paris"); the respect for "La Patria" (Alessandro carelessly tosses away the Italian flag like useless garbage); the respect for property (after Mother's death, Ale and Giulia burn all her furniture and belongings in celebration!); the inviolability of the incest taboo (though it's never clear whether Ale and Giulia have actual intercourse, he aches with love and sexual desire for her).

Bellocchio uses Alessandro's bipolar disorder to make a film of moods and sharp contrasts. Amazingly, it was the work of beginners: it was not only Bellocchio's feature debut (he was barely 25), but also the debut of D.P. Alberto Marrama, whose chiaroscuro cinematography alternates blazing clarity and claustrophobic darkness; of cameraman Giuseppe Lanci (he would become Bellocchio's D.P. in the 80s), who juxtaposes shots of beautiful classical inspiration (Giulia sunbathing in the large veranda) and unsettling modernism (the unforgettable last sequence); of editor Aurelio Mangiarotti (a.k.a. Silvano Agosti), who translates the highs and lows of Ale's moods into contrasting rhythms (the electrifying "Sorpasso" scene vs. the delicate bathtub murder scene); and of art director Gisella Longo, who opposes the signals of old Catholic rural bourgeoisie (family daguerreotypes, old-style furniture and Catholic symbols) with the adapted-to-new-times pop bourgeoisie of Lucia's (Augusto's fiancée) world, especially in the beautiful, Zurliniesque night-club sequence.

Bellocchio's assuredness in exploring images, structure, music (a surprisingly succinct score by the great Ennio Morricone) and dialog is astounding, but the film wouldn't be quite as impressive without the powerhouse performance by Lou Castel. With his tormented looks -- a cross between the sensitivity and danger of a young Brando (whose photograph in "The WIld One" we see many times by Giulia's bed) and the scary madness of a Klaus Kinski -- emotional unpredictability and borderline intensity, Castel's Alessandro is one of the greatest young male roles/performances in film history, a "jeune maudit" perfectly worthy of Dostoevsky.

"Fists" reminds us of the creative freedom of the provocative, rebel cinema of a Buñuel. Bellocchio joins other early 60s greats (Pasolini, Bertolucci, Zurlini, Karel Reisz, Lindsay Anderson) in the examination of the deterioration of the "sacred family" and the struggling-for-survival anti-conformism of the younger generation: families were never the same again after this film (think of Pasolini's "Teorema", Visconti's "Conversation Piece", Fassbinder, Ozon, Garrel, Scorsese). **SPOILER** All is crowned by the last scene, where Bellocchio gives Alessandro's final epileptic seizure such orgasmic climax -- to the sound of Violetta's hysterical anthem to hedonism, the aria "Sempre Libera" from Verdi's "La Traviata" -- that we have to stop breathing during that last endless high note of agony and ecstasy; how many finales were ever this cathartic? When was a scene of death so powerfully liberating?

"Fist" is one of the greatest anti-conformist manifestos and one of the most stunning directorial debuts in movie history. Unlike some revolutionary masterpieces, its impact and power remain to this day alive, unsettling, unforgettable.

fists in the eye of the cinema

[lqualls-dchin · 10/10 · 7 May 2008]

When this film first appeared in the 1960s, the effect was so startlingly individual: there had never been a film as bold, as seemingly unhinged, yet as ruthlessly controlled, as this first feature by Marco Bellocchio. The wonderfully atmospheric black-and-white cinematography seemed to be developed from some dingy dream which dared to bring out into the open the most heinous family secrets, yet the utterly dispassionate fury which animated the most frenzied sequences was so freakish it was almost funny. This constant tension somehow allowed for a sneaky kind of compassion to enter the movie, so that the family dynamics, though extreme, seemed to come out of a common nightmare. FISTS IN THE POCKET remains an embattled cry for a new society, by focusing on the remnants of the diseased upper classes, yet this tale of sound and fury seems to have been made in the kind of frenzied reverie that is analogous to the stream-of-conscious jumble which William Faulkner used at the beginning of THE SOUND AND THE FURY, and to the same effect, i.e., to chart a family's disintegration as a mirror to the decaying grandeur of a dying society.

One of the best Italian movies ever!

[stededalus · 10/10 · 2 July 2006]

Marco Bellocchio directs his first full-length film, and it's already a masterpiece, a milestone in the history of Italian cinema.This movie is all about contemporary uneasiness and family crisis in today's society (only, some two decades in advance). Every time I hear of family massacres on the news, I've got to think about problematic, disturbed Lou Castel deciding to get rid of his mother and younger brother for the benefit of the eldest, embodying not only a stage of criminality, but above all a wrong philosophy, a twisted point of view about life, a failed maturity. Ennio Morricone' score is just perfect, fully successful in his aim to highlight the dramatic potential of the story. Lou Castel has never acted like this, his grimacing and his usage of the dead moments are unforgettable. The frames of the mother's death are like an howl, they "send shivers down your spine". A must-see.

Tame in comparison to what we can see these days

[jordondave-28085 · 6/10 · 12 April 2023]

(1965) Fists in My Pocket/ I pugni in tasca PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA

Written and directed by Marco Bellocchio starring Marino Masé as Augusto craving to leave his family life to marry and be independent, except that he has one brother who has epilepsy, his mother is blind, and another brother who has seizures, Alessandro or Ale for short(Lou Castel). The only 2 people who appear to not having any kind of physical ailments are the oldest brother, Augusto and his sister, Giulia (Paola Pitagora) who may have some incest thoughts. Viewers soon learn that Ale also has a mental ailment as well as a social path who reacts to his oldest brothers burden. Music score by Ennio Morricone. Controversial in it's initial release and denounced by the Catholic church.

Perhaps not the masterpiece some claim of it but essential nevertheless.

[MOscarbradley · 8/10 · 5 November 2020]

The family in Marco Bellocchio's startling debut "Fists in the Pocket" make the Femms of "The Old Dark House" seem normal. These indolent Italians laze around all day taunting each other at every opportunity while son Allessandro, (a truly terrific Lou Castel), contemplates the best ways to rid himself of the others, including his blind mother, for the sake of the one brother he cares about. This darkly funny satire wasn't like other Italian films of the time, taking an almost putrid look at the family values Italians hold most dear; a comedy about matricide, fratricide and possible incest that actually manages to be quite touching at times. It's also a movie that takes its time. For a director making only his first feature, Bellocchio bravely put narraitve on the back-burner opting instead for an atmosphere as lazy as his characters and killing off a number of sacred cows in the process. The Establishment hated it while young critics loved it though not enough to make it anything other than a cult movie and it's seldom revived. Perhaps its reputation outweighs its numerous qualities but however you look at it, it's a one-off and well worth seeing.

Michel Houellebecq says Hello!

[PimpinAinttEasy · 6/10 · 25 November 2015]

Pimpin places a call to his favorite writer Michel Houellebecq.

Pimpin: Hello.

Michel: Hello. Who is this?

Pimpin: Michel, its me Pimpin.

Michel: What do you want?

Pimpin: Sorry to disturb. I wanted to discuss a film that I watched. I wanted to hear your thoughts on it. Its this Italian film - Fists in the Pocket by Marco Belloccio. Came out in the 60s.

Michel: OK.

Pimpin: What do you think about it?

Michel: It did have a couple of nice pieces of ass. Paola Pitagora was unforgettable.

Pimpin: Hahahha. I agree. What did you think about the film?

Michel: Well, it was one of those films where the protagonist rebelled against his family and Catholic values. You know what I think about all that stuff, Pimpin. Nothing good came out of it. Sure, a lot of people escaped their families. And then they went and lived alone. Did drugs. Drank a lot. Individuality and personal freedom. Look at where all that got Europe now.

Pimpin: I thought the film was quite slow.

Michel: Its a piece of crap. But then, it was made in the 60s.

Pimpin: I did some research on it. The film apparently predicted the student and youth riots of the late 60s in Italy.

Michel: Hahahah. You really bought into all that crap?

Pimpin: I know its a bit like how Indian social commentators use crappy films like Deewar to explain the 70s and 80s.

Michel: Exactly. Its completely phony Pimpin.

Pimpin: I'm still confused. I don't know what to think about the film. I mean, the film is quite depressing.

Michel: Well, tell me something about the cinematography, pacing and background score. That would help us interpret it better.

Pimpin: It was a very stark film. Morricone's score was very bleak. The score is played during all the murder and post-murder scenes. It is one of Morricone's bleakest scores. I liked the way some of the scenes were framed. Like at the party where the rebellious protagonist is sitting alone and there are a lot of people dancing. He does not even drink. He has no bad habits. But he wants to kill off his family. The pacing was slow.

Michel: Did you identify with the film?

Pimpin: Sort of. But like I said it was too slow. The actors were great. The director was quite successful in capturing the claustrophobic environment in which the family lives.

Michel: Did you get married recently?

Pimpin: Yes.

Michel: So you are not to be trusted.

Pimpin: Why?

Michel: You would have liked this film a lot more during your wild bachelor days.

Pimpin: Thats probably true, Michel.

Michel: It is.

Pimpin: I did think that it was a very personal film. I mean, the director is very talented. He did portray the ills of the bourgeois life and the life lived on pure instinct quite well. I don't think he was rooting for either.

Michel: Did it work as a murder mystery?

Pimpin: No. I think it works best as the zeitgeist of that time in Italy. But it was quite boring for me.

Michel: OK. Is there anything else that you want to discuss?

Pimpin: The actors were great. I mean, most of them were better than the ones in the worst Indian movies. But I would not watch another movie because anyone of them were in it.

Michel: OK.

Pimpin: Read about he Paris attacks. Quite scary.

Michel: (Silence)

Pimpin: Hello?

Michel: Pimpin, you weren't too impressed by this film. In fact, you were bored to death. You only called me because it had an 8 rating on IMDb.

Pimpin: You are right, Michel.

Michel: Take care, Pimpin.

Pimpin: Bye, Michel.

Michel: Bye

Sandro did not pull any punches.

[dbdumonteil · 8/10 · 19 May 2018]

An epileptic young man in a bourgeois family who,as soon we meet them ,seems not only to be living in the past,but to be already dead :they only get out of the house to go to the cemetery;the blind wodowed mother has delegated her authority to her elder son ,a nice handome man who "takes care" of his siblings :a girl who seems in love with her brother -she does want to see the prostitute her brother sleeps with,as though she would like to be her(and thus his) just for a while -, a half-wit ,and Sandro who passes for a ne'er do well to his clever brother's eyes:he is denied everything ,all his attempts to get out of this mausoleum fail (taking his driving licence , raising rabbits )and his restrained hatred knows no bounds .He's really got a chip on his shoulder ,and he becomes almost fascistic : one has to get rid of the improductive population - like in Rosselini's " Germania Anno Zero "in which a schoolteacher ,feeling nostalgic for the Führer, urges a little boy to kill his bedridden father-He does not realize he is in a cul de sac ;his big brother did stay with them because of the mother ,but as soon as she dies ,he wants to get married and to live his life .

Sexually repressed -he refuses to dance with a girl who invites him (and not the other way around) and can only have sex with a prostitute,life is a blind alley for Sandro ;as for his big brother,he cannot stand his licit happiness ,he feels the approval of the others ,of the society ,still cooped up in this petty life.As he is not able to get rid of this powerful man who accepts the golden rules,he sacrifices a substitute ,his kid brother.

Bellochio 's movie should be seen as a fable ,a transparent metaphor ,not really realistic ,with elements of melodrama (the sister's fate);Sandro is sick ,but so are people around them even though they are not aware that their old world ,through a slow process but inexorably , is collapsing .Epilepsy is just an alibi.

"Il Pugni In Tasca" took a rebel stand against the family;but Marco Bellochio's fight had only just begun: " Nel Name Del Padre " denounced the Church;in "Marcia Trionfale",at a time the militay service still existed in Italy (and almost everywhere in Europa),the army was hauled over the coals.

Style over substance

[gbill-74877 · 4/10 · 13 February 2023]

As Godard's Breathless was to French cinema, a stylish rupture with the past featuring a nihilistic lead character, so is Fists in the Pocket to Italian cinema. There is a certain visual appeal to this film, Lou Castel turns in a fine performance, and the score from Ennio Morricone finds a way to fit its bizarre story. Unfortunately, it's unpleasant to watch the main character's misdirected (and never particularly justified) rage explode. I believe director Marco Bellocchio's intention with the story was to satirize some of Italy's institutions, like family and the church, but I don't think he was all that successful because he spends most of his time on a deeply dysfunctional family.

Bellocchio gives us a cartoonishly distorted bourgeois family, one with incest, epilepsy, a learning disability, and blindness. The adult children behave like animals at the dinner table and know no boundaries. It's as if you see Bellocchio's mind work at trying to throw everything he could into creating the bizarre, claustrophobic, and insulated world they inhabit, referencing among other things Cocteau's Les Enfants Terrible. The fact that he used disabilities and mental illness as part of this is problematic to me, and the film would have been much more powerful without them.

The young man with pent-up rage (hence, fists in pocket) wants to f* his sister (and his brother's fiancée), throws his blind mother off a cliff, and then proceeds to trash his family's ancestral belongings. He is a combination of (literally) burn-it-all-down nihilism with some kind of mental illness, which didn't lead to any profound revelations. In the film's best scene, we get a glimpse of his alienation. He's at a party, with other young people dancing in sync, and he's awkward and isolated. If only there had been more of this kind of thing, or if he had some kind of humanizing virtues. As it was, it's more about the shock value of a completely unlikeable murderous epileptic. I liked the style of this one, but not the substance, and was glad when it was over.

Divine work...

[RosanaBotafogo · 9/10 · 31 August 2021]

What a deeply sad film, what an unhappy family, what a melancholy and depressive drama, what strong and intense performances, they manage to convey all the pain and despair, all the kindness and dubious altruism of the characters... Marco, in his work, managed to show all the purity and despair of those affected by disturbances, physical or psychological, the soreness of a society of empowerment and exclusion, divine work...

I quit watching it

[taonemozilchhm · 29 March 2019]

I quit watching after 30 minutes, wasn't interested in the storyline and it seemed to be going nowhere. I found it boring and I wasn't interested in the characters.

Increasingly disturbing

[guisreis · 8/10 · 30 October 2020]

Beautifully filmed, with nice cinematography and camera movements, mostly in indoor footage, the novienis also interesting in its unique subject. While the development of the story is perhaps too slow in the beginning (although with some grat scenes), the film becomes incrisingly disturbing. Hatred for family, order and tradition is portrayed as aiming a final solution - if you understand what I mean... All members of the family (in different ways, all of them are overly self-centred) are well developped in their dysfunctional relationship, phisically represented in blindness, intellectual disability and epilepsy. Curiously, a "handicapped" himself is moved by a creepy cleansing impulse. Even his closest person, his beautiful sister, with whom he has a complicity relatiinship, is not out of danger.

Cinema Omnivore - Fists in the Pocket (1965) 8.0/10

[lasttimeisaw · 8/10 · 21 June 2022]

"With murder-suicide changing into a series of murders, Bellocchio unblinkingly divulges the worst in human nature, namely, how a younger generation sets to annihilate the older one, how handicap is cavalierly gauged as a disposable liability and most astutely, in the case of Augusto, whose saneness betrays his own morally compromised cruelty. After getting wise of Sandro's motive, he simply stays put, nominally regarding it as a joke, but Masé's subtle expression implies that Augusto might not entirely against the dastardly plan, after all, he has all the gainful benefit in the aftermath without being the actual wrongdoer, how many of us could resist such a temptation? At the age of 26, Bellocchio already sets out his stall as a formidable, perspicacious scrutinizer of humanity's dark torrents."

read my full review on my blog: Cinema Omnivore, thanks.

A bit shocking, but it leaves you cold

[Pumpkin-16 · 5/10 · 14 February 2000]

I found it a bit disappointing. There are great moments -the funeral or the dance party for example- but as a whole I came out of the theater pretty unimpressed. Still, you have to remember that it first came out in 1965,and what happens in the movie must have chilled the Italian public of that time. Rating;6