Sacco & Vanzetti (1971)

One of my all time favorites.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

My current obsession with Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté eventually brought me to Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco and Vanzetti, an excellent courtroom drama where Volonté and Riccardo Cucciolla play two anarchists unjustly tried for murder, while it becomes obvious they're in fact being tried for being anarchists, lefties, reds, whatever, in a country that never had any love for them, and in a time that was perhaps the second worst time to be an anarchist/communist/socialist in America after the McCarthy years. This movie is set a few decades before that, but the hysteria and strident violation of civil rights is the same.Montaldo does a good job directing the movie - for instance the black-and-white opening sequence, with the cops making a raid on an Italian neighbourhood, rounding up men, women and children in front of their buildings, spanking innocent people, and basically acting like vicious animals, is a powerful sequence that immediately sets the theme of abuse of power. Then we have the courtroom scenes, with Cyril Cusack playing a fierce DA seeking to send the two anarchists to the electric chair, Geoffrey Keen playing a clearly bigoted judge, and Milo O'Shea as the defense lawyer who is systematically humiliated, bullied and discredited because he's doing his job too well. When these three actors share a scene you can see sparks fly off the screen! Ennio Morricone provides the music, which is melancholy and elegiac, and Joan Baez contributes with some excellent ballads that are positioned in key moments of the movie. These two together make the score for this movie one of the best I've ever heard.Gian Maria Volonté is of course excellent: his performance is showier and more furious than Cucciolla's. But then their characters also have different personalities. Whereas Volonté's character, Vanzetti, understands the mythical dimension of his person, realizes that his death will turn him into a symbol of freedom for the new generations, and he's fine with that, Cucciolla plays Sacco, an ordinary man who wants to live and who is having trouble accepting his new condition as a man charged with murder. Cucciolla received a prize in Cannes for his performance in this movie over Volonté and I have to say it wasn't undeserved. His subdued, reserved performance was the right touch that makes him the focus point of the viewer's sympathies.Sacco and Vanzetti is a great movie, a beautiful movie, that tells an interesting episode about American history that is often ignored - the racism, discrimination and suspicion against immigrants. Like any other country, the USA has an official history that is more mythology than truth, that is inevitable to all nations in their construction of a national identity, but I'm glad there will always be movies like these to continue to deflate the myths and reveal the truth. I just hope there will always be viewers for them too.

My comment could not possibly add anything to the ones already available. I just want to say that the latest scandal in this story is that the film has not been made available on DVD ! Is there a conspiracy still going on to prevent such films from being watched by new generations ? I am exasperated to see that thousands of trash films are published on DVD every month while such masterpieces are still ignored. Sacco e Vanzetti reaches far beyond the subject of the two anarchists ignominiously put to death in a misconducted trial. The ghosts of the two men are still behind every prejudiced account by the media, every lie by politicians all over the world. It calls for better institutions, better democracy all over the world. The fact that so many film buffs bothered to express their admiration for this outstanding movie should entice a publisher to make this film at last available. I have kept checking for years, but nothing so far.

It is perhaps not without significance that Guiliano Montaldo worked as Assistant Director on Gillo Pontecorvo's brilliant KAPO, since there is a tangible link in terms of attitude, emotional power and political commitment between this film and Pontecorvo's other outstanding films. Great films are, very often, a means of conveying ideas, and, as Pudovkin once said, film is the greatest teacher because it reaches us both through the head and the emotions. Maybe this is why politically correct authoritarians are always chiding us `not to be sentimental' since emotions are something these control freaks can't orchestrate!Whatever one's views about the political sympathies of Sacco and Vanzetti, this film shows that they were victims of the hysterical climate of the times and place in which they found themselves, and their plight is represented with great humanism, empathy and power, helped in no small measure by the superb musical score of Ennio Morricone, which must rank as one of his very best. Montaldo's whole technique is thoroughly cinematic, and the acting and all technical credits are faultless.One somewhat disturbing aspect of this film however, was when I saw it in the USA, Sacco in his final speech from the dock declared, `We stand here because we are anarchists', (it struck at the time because I never thought I'd live to see the day that such a piece of dialogue would be delivered in a film distributed by MGM!), but, in its only screening in the UK on BBC television, this line was changed to `We stand here because we are radicals'. Hmmm! Not quite the same thing. On two other occasions I have noticed `creative subtitling' on French speaking movies, so maybe we should start a campaign for accurate and faithful subtitles!A brilliant film, in my all-time top 100, so when is anyone going to issue it on video?

Magnificent rendition of the people, circumstances and atmosphere surrounding the infamous "Palmer Raids", the paranoia of the keepers of law and order and the status quo, and of course the frame-up of Sacco and Vanzetti.It is worthwhile to know that the governor of Massachussets recently exonerated Sacco and Vanzetti, calling their trial a shameful mark on the face of American judiciary system.