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.

)[4] Young Swedish actor Lou Castel, whom Bellocchio had met at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia and who eventually took the part of Alessandro, had his voice dubbed by Paolo Carlini.

[16] While mostly well received by critics, the film was attacked by members of the Christian Democracy party for its portrayal of the family[17] and dismissed by directors Luis Buñuel and Michelangelo Antonioni, two of Bellocchio's favourite filmmakers.

[9][18] 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.

[19] 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).

[1] When shown in the US three years later, Maurice Rapf of Life magazine titled it a "brilliant, sinister-sweet first film", drawing parallels to The Little Foxes,[20] and Pauline Kael of The New Yorker spoke of "surely one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of movies".

[6] In later years, critics and film historians read Fists in the Pocket as a Free Cinema inspired break with filmic or neorealist tradition[21][22] and, in its protagonist's revolt against the family, as an artistic precursor of the protests of 1968.