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Giuliano Montaldo, the admired Italian filmmaker who wrote and directed Sacco & Vanzetti, the John Cassavetes-starring Machine Gun McCain and every episode of the big-budget 1982 miniseries Marco Polo, has died. He was 93.

Montaldo died Wednesday at his home in Rome, his family announced.

His big-screen résumé also included The Reckless (1965), starring Renato Salvatori; Grand Slam (1967), starring Janet Leigh; Giordano Bruno (1973), starring Gian Maria Volonté and Charlotte Rampling; And Agnes Chose to Die (1976), starring Ingrid Thulin; and The Gold Rimmed Glasses (1987), starring Philippe Noiret, Rupert Everett, Stefania Sandrelli and Valeria Golino.

Of the 20 films Montaldo helmed, 16 were set to music by Ennio Morricone; no other director collaborated with the famed composer more.

Montaldo also served as president of Italy’s Rai Cinema from 1999-2004.

Montaldo’s gangster tale Machine Gun McCain (1969), which also starred Britt Ekland, Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk, and Sacco & Vanzetti (1971), about the Massachusetts trial and 1927 execution of...

Giuliano Montaldo, the prolific Italian director, actor and film industry executive, whose works comprise powerful political drama “Sacco and Vanzetti” about the Massachusetts trial and execution in 1927 of accused Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, has died at his home in Rome. He was 93.

His death was announced Wednesday by his family and reported by multiple Italian media outlets. No cause of death was revealed.

Born in 1930 in Genoa, Montaldo was still a Turin university student when, in 1950, director Carlo Lizzani gave him a role in the film “Achtung Banditi!.” Montaldo then moved to Rome in 1954, where he worked as a journalist for Italian newspaper Il Tempo and after a few years decided to pursue a filmmaking career.

Montaldo cut his teeth as a director working as an assistant to Lizzani and then to Gillo Pontecorvo, Sergio Leone, and Francesco Rosi, learning the ropes from some of the masters of Italian cinema.

If American filmgoers are at all aware of the work of filmmaker Damiano Damiani, it’s likely because of his deranged “Zapata western” A Bullet for the General, or else his bonkers horror sequel Amityville II: The Possession, which easily surpasses its more famous predecessor in sheer Wtf factor. Neither of those films are necessarily indicative of Damiani’s serious-minded approach to the titles included in Radiance Films’s Cosa Nostra: Franco Nero in Three Mafia Tales by Damiano Damiani, but they do illustrate Damiani’s determination to pepper his works with pungent social commentary. The three films in this new box set may illuminate very different aspects of the mafia’s tentacular grip on Sicilian society, but they’re united in their bleak, often hopeless diagnoses of these social ills.

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Welcome to Ground Zero for ‘Committed Cinema’ Italian style. Director Giuiano Montaldo filmed his dream project on location in Ireland and a bit in Boston, with top stars Gian Maria Volontè and Riccardo Cucciolla. In one of the highest-profile American ‘media’ trials ever the famed immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti were tried for a crime but convicted by politics: even the judge asserted they were guilty by definition. Montaldo shows how wrongly justice can be served without whitewashing the defendants. UK actors Cyril Cusack and Milo O’Shea up the performance level, and the Ennio Morricone / Joan Baez songs have kept the film alive.

Sacco & Vanzetti

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1971 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 125 min. / Street Date May 3, 2022 / Sacco e Vanzetti; Intolerance (shooting title?) / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Gian Maria Volontè, Riccardo Cucciolla, Cyril Cusack, Rosanna Fratello, Geoffrey Keen, Milo O’Shea, William Prince, Claude Mann, Edward Jewesbury, Armenia Balducci, Valentino Orfeo,...

Stars: Lea Lander, George Eastman, Riccardo Cucciolla, Don Backy, Maurice Poli, Maria Fabbri, Erika Dario, Luigi Antonio Guerra, Francesco Ferrini, Emilio Bonucci, Pino Manzari, Ettore Manni | Written by Alessandro Parenzo | Directed by Mario Bava

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