Sacco e Vanzetti

What great roles for Gian Maria Volontè and Riccardo Cucciolla, two excellent actors! Very good Cyril Cusack and Geoffrey Keen too, in two roles of villains law enforcement officials! Milo O'Shea and William Prince are also very good as the lawyers trying to save Nicola and Bart. Another film that demonstrates that the idea of humanity is only a lie, real democracy doesn't exist, and the justice is just a bad joke. Morricone and Joan Baez are excellent too.

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?

Frank McGurk "Guilty or Innocent???" for writing a WRONG comment?

I quote with correction:

"recent ballistic tests on the weapons proved that the gun found on Nicola Sacco was NOT (NO-NEIN) the gun used to murder the payroll guards"!

Be careful guys... ...if you don't want roll injustice over and over again...

N.B. If also not so, remember that the real guilty man confessed his crime. But the court refuse to admit his confession, because he was already put to death for other crimes.

take care

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.

A good political film about the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. A historical and biographical film about two great people who until the end were sincere and honest with their ideology. They were condemned only for their ideas. This case has become a symbol of injustice in the court.