Word: vanzettis
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...rights a film of the Sacco-Vanzetti affair should have been a natural. History provided everything--racism, repression, corruption in high places, the execution of innocents. Given the least bit of subtlety and finesse, a contemporary retelling of the episode could have been both popular and politically apt. As it is, Giuliano Montaldo has directed a sloppy and sentimentalized muddle of a film...
Sacco and Vanzetti is mired in good intentions. And though Montaldo's heart is in the rights place, his camera is not. Narratively, the film is a botch; it wanders and is tedious. Montaldo's boundless sympathy for the anarchist pair erodes his intellectual discipline, and the painstaking journey through the seven-year ordeal is finally not worth the effort...
...staccato ring of a contemporary editorial, but the words are from John Dos Passos' U.S.A., circa 1936. The outburst was triggered by the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists accused of a Massachusetts robbery and killing, and tried in the atmosphere of '20s xenophobia...
...attempts to save these men gave moral impetus to the American Left, and they still exert a powerful undertow in Sacco and Vanzetti, an Italian film. Sacco, a fishmonger, and Vanzetti, a shoemaker, have always been simultaneously visible and obscure, martyrs but not men. As played by Gian Maria Volonte and Riccardo Cucciolla, they are credible and pathetic-good, bewildered souls whom history has scorched by its proximity. As they watch themselves railroaded to the electric chair, they shout in anger, then grow numb, and finally reach a plane of philosophy that forgives their executioners and redeems their adopted country...
...myth with shadings of tragedy: accusation, trial, death and catharsis. It is well to remember, however, that while Sacco and Vanzetti were real men, their film biography is not the quasi documentary it pretends to be but a moving, even cataclysmic fiction...