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1965 Italian film

Fists in the Pocket is a 1965 Italian satirical drama film written and directed by Marco Bellocchio and starring Lou Castel. It was Bellocchio's first feature film and became one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year. The film centers on a young man suffering from epilepsy, who plots the murders of the members of his dysfunctional family. In 2008, Fists in the Pocket was included in the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage's 100 Italian films to be saved, a list of 100 films that "have changed the collective memory of the country between 1942 and 1978."

Four siblings, a sister and three brothers, live with their blind, widowed mother in a provincial villa. The younger brothers Alessandro and Leone are epileptics, while sister Giulia, with whom Alessandro shares an incestous attraction, is mentally disturbed. Augusto, the eldest brother and apparently sane, is the family's only provider. When Augusto's fiancée Lucia receives an anonymous letter whose addressor pretends to be pregnant by him, he immediately realises that it was written by Giulia. Alessandro, who is disgusted with his family, decides that Augusto would be free to live with Lucia if the mother and other siblings were gotten rid of, while at the same time begrudging his older brother's dominant position. Alessandro connives to be allowed to drive his mother, Leone and Giulia on their periodic trip to a cemetery, pretending that he passed his driving test which he actually failed. After he has left, Augusto reads a note by Alessandro saying that he would kill all of them and himself. Due to a confrontation with another driver, which, cheered on by Giulia, leads to a car race, he lets go of his plan, and they all return home safely, where Augusto slaps Alessandro. Some time later, Alessandro takes his mother for a drive. They stop at an overlook, and Alessandro pushes his mother off the cliff to her death. During the wake, he confesses his crime to Giulia, but his sister does not give him away. After the mother's funeral, Alessandro kills Leone by giving him an overdose of his medication and drowning him in the bathtub. Giulia realises that Alessandro killed Leone and, in a state of shock, falls down the stairs, which leaves her bed ridden. Alessandro tries to suffocate the sleeping Giulia with a pillow, but is unable to do so. He falls into another epileptic fit and dies, witnessed by his sister who does not intervene.

Bellocchio had based his script for Fists in the Pocket (originally titled "Epilepsy" before finally taking its name from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud) partially on his own biography.

Fists in the Pocket was denied a screening at the Venice Film Festival and premiered at the July 1965 Locarno Film Festival, where it was awarded the Silver Sail. While mostly well received by critics, the film was attacked by members of the Christian Democracy party for its portrayal of the family and dismissed by directors Luis Buñuel and Michelangelo Antonioni, two of Bellocchio's favourite filmmakers. On the other hand, director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini expressed his respect in a letter to Bellocchio, calling his film a representative of a "cinema of prose" in which content prevails instead of style, and one which had gone beyond Italian neorealism. Upon its initial release, reviewers called Fists in the Pocket a "diabolical and unpleasant" film whose strength was being "unconventional and free" (Piacenza Oggi), "a work which stands on it own", turning naturalism into a "stylistic tour de force" (Italo Calvino, Rinascita), and Bellocchio "most likely a director of the first rank" (Mario Soldati, Il Giorno). and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker spoke of "surely one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies". and, in its protagonist's revolt against the family, as an artistic precursor of the protests of 1968.

The film underwent a 4K restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna's L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, which was completed in 2015. The restoration was funded by the Cineteca di Bologna, Armani, and Kavac Film, and supervised by Bellocchio.