SACCO & VANZETTI
Directed by Giuliano Montaldo
Written by Fabrizio Onofri, Giuliano Montaldo, Ottavio Jemma
Starring Gian Maria Volonte
Released in 1971
Directed by Giuliano Montaldo
Written by Fabrizio Onofri, Giuliano Montaldo, Ottavio Jemma
Starring Gian Maria Volonte
Released in 1971
Politicians and economists can save their breath yakking about financial crises as long as people continue to mass together in fist fights over obsolete junk at Walmart the day after Thanksgiving. When no one shows up at China Junior to do their mindless bargain safaris on what some idiot savant decided to call Black Friday, then and only then will I be interested in how previously spoiled Americans are having a hard time making ends meet.
There actually have been times in this country when survival was a daily struggle for millions of people. Those were the years immediately preceding World War I and throughout much of World War II and including the so-called roaring twenties when the only things that kept the U.S. economy from being permanently dead were war, public works, more war and other conservative uses of liberal reform. The very nature of democratic politics and a capitalist economy requires that the illusion of pluralism be maintained while resources get gobbled up by a self-described elite (and genuinely small) segment of the populace at the expense of the ever-growing majority into which pours an immigrant class that is lured here with the promise of mercy and freedom only to discover that mercy means slave labor and freedom means a nightstick across the teeth.
In the early years of the first world war, a lot of European immigrants came to the United States because in their home countries the economies were receding into a strange type of class feudalism. With hatred and barbarism the only way up at home, the United States with its promises of advancement looked pretty appealing. Just as a few years later in America, the absence of mass communication would make it possible for the propertied class to entice the displayed and ruined farm workers to flock from the dust bowl to California while each family remained unaware that everyone else was heading in the same direction, so did the placards and scuttlebutt of the day encourage the mass migration from countries such as Italy and Ireland into the land of milk and honey, even though the milk was sour and the honey caked with flies.
Into this quagmire strolled a shoemaker and fish salesmen, both from Italy and both evidently fans of an Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani. Many anarchists of the 1910s were nothing more than glorified bomb-throwers with a political agenda. However, some of the more thoughtful in their midst sought an economic and political system freed from the tyranny of both large government and large business. These thinkers agreed with the syndicalists that what was needed was a world divided into small and interdependent enclaves that would provide sufficiency for everyone. These men and women were not Bolsheviks, although by the time of the Red Scare of 1918 and 1919, they would be lumped into that particular pot along with liberals, progressives, and socialists.
The Galleanists did utilize bomb attacks against what they believed to be holders of inherently corrupt positions in the U.S. government, including an attempted bombing of the notorious Red Scare leader, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. One such attack went haywire and ended up killing the perpetrator instead. An associate of the Italian anarchists, a man named Andrea Salsedo, was picked up by the Justice Department. He met his end after falling from a fourteenth floor window in the building from which he was in all likelihood pushed.
Salsedo had been arrested by the Bureau of Investigations (the precursor to the FBI) on suspicion of involvement in the April 15, 1920 robbery of the payroll at the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. A security guard and paymaster were both murdered by the perpetrators of this robbery.
Nicola Sacco and Bertolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920. When picked up by the cops, they were found carrying guns and anarchist literature.
An ambitious judge and even more ambitious prosecutor thrust themselves into the case. The prosecutor, Frederick Katzmann, secured a conviction against Vanzetti in Judge Webster Thayer's court on a charge of an attempted robbery that had occurred the previous Christmas Eve. But the real trial was yet to come.
In 1971, an Italian filmmaker named Giuliano Montaldo made a film that focused heavily on the second trial. In a fresh and exciting documentary fashion, Sacco & Vanzetti opens in stark black and white, giving a fast recap of the events leading up to the robbery and murders. Watching the movie today, it is easy to see the influence of this filmmaker on a young Oliver Stone when the latter created JFKtwenty years later. We witness actions by the players in this real life drama from the point of view of the director, as well as from other participants, the narrative running ahead and slamming brakes, hopping back and spinning wildly, yet holding together through the nearly exhausting talent of the actors on the screen. Riccardo Cucciolla plays Sacco. Since that name probably means nothing to you, perhaps think of a young Tony Shalhoub. His character's timidity and outrage make him simultaneously sympathetic and dangerous without the raving sentimentality or melodrama those terms normally imply. The closest we get to cheap emotion is when Sacco's wife is looking for their son Dante while Nicola is being herded into a paddy wagon. We perceive his helplessness and feel his relief when the boy turns up wandering through the crowd.
It is, however, the fierceness of actor Gian Maria Volonte who, as Vanzetti, draws in the camera on every scene in which he appears. Tall, with a lecherous mustache, he also exhibits a sophistication that his character apparently did indeed possess. This is a man who would frighten people like Palmer and Edgar Hoover just by walking down the street on a sunny day.
Montaldo's film does an amazing job of recreating the flamboyant racism of Katzmann's prosecution of the two Italians as defense witness after witness is discredited due to a language barrier or nationality.
The components of the actual evidence were hardly demonstrative in and of themselves to warrant the conviction and subsequent death sentences handed down by the incompetent judge. But matters went far beyond mere incompetence. The firearms evidence was consistently tampered with and the only way this kind of nonsense could happen in America today would be if we were in the midst of some type of war on terrorism that resulted in American lives being at risk overseas, or with special renditions, or with the accused being denied proper legal representation. That, of course, is the source of the continuing relevance and downright popular fascination with this case.
In 2006, director Peter Miller released a real documentary about the case. This film, Sacco and Vanzetti (without the ampersand), gives us moving voice-overs by Tony Shalhoub and John Turturro reading letters written by the title characters from their prison cells. But the real force of this presentation comes from the historians, of all people. These folks, especially Howard Zinn and Mary Anne Trasciatti, tell the story in a way that makes contemporary the grief of the travesty of justice that resulted in the execution of these two men. The audience is also struck by the courage of Sacco and especially Vanzetti as they face a future they cannot help but understand all too well.
One of the most ironic elements in the film comes near the end when the daughter of one of the robbery victims recalls how she was in a college English class when the professor handed out poems for the members of the class to read aloud. She was given--apparently by accident--a poem written by Edna St. Vincent Mallay called "Justice Denied in Massachusetts." After class, one of the daughter's classmates told the instructor who the young lady was. His horror can only be imagined.
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted--
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited --
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued --
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
There actually have been times in this country when survival was a daily struggle for millions of people. Those were the years immediately preceding World War I and throughout much of World War II and including the so-called roaring twenties when the only things that kept the U.S. economy from being permanently dead were war, public works, more war and other conservative uses of liberal reform. The very nature of democratic politics and a capitalist economy requires that the illusion of pluralism be maintained while resources get gobbled up by a self-described elite (and genuinely small) segment of the populace at the expense of the ever-growing majority into which pours an immigrant class that is lured here with the promise of mercy and freedom only to discover that mercy means slave labor and freedom means a nightstick across the teeth.
In the early years of the first world war, a lot of European immigrants came to the United States because in their home countries the economies were receding into a strange type of class feudalism. With hatred and barbarism the only way up at home, the United States with its promises of advancement looked pretty appealing. Just as a few years later in America, the absence of mass communication would make it possible for the propertied class to entice the displayed and ruined farm workers to flock from the dust bowl to California while each family remained unaware that everyone else was heading in the same direction, so did the placards and scuttlebutt of the day encourage the mass migration from countries such as Italy and Ireland into the land of milk and honey, even though the milk was sour and the honey caked with flies.
Into this quagmire strolled a shoemaker and fish salesmen, both from Italy and both evidently fans of an Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani. Many anarchists of the 1910s were nothing more than glorified bomb-throwers with a political agenda. However, some of the more thoughtful in their midst sought an economic and political system freed from the tyranny of both large government and large business. These thinkers agreed with the syndicalists that what was needed was a world divided into small and interdependent enclaves that would provide sufficiency for everyone. These men and women were not Bolsheviks, although by the time of the Red Scare of 1918 and 1919, they would be lumped into that particular pot along with liberals, progressives, and socialists.
The Galleanists did utilize bomb attacks against what they believed to be holders of inherently corrupt positions in the U.S. government, including an attempted bombing of the notorious Red Scare leader, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. One such attack went haywire and ended up killing the perpetrator instead. An associate of the Italian anarchists, a man named Andrea Salsedo, was picked up by the Justice Department. He met his end after falling from a fourteenth floor window in the building from which he was in all likelihood pushed.
Salsedo had been arrested by the Bureau of Investigations (the precursor to the FBI) on suspicion of involvement in the April 15, 1920 robbery of the payroll at the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. A security guard and paymaster were both murdered by the perpetrators of this robbery.
Nicola Sacco and Bertolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on May 5, 1920. When picked up by the cops, they were found carrying guns and anarchist literature.
An ambitious judge and even more ambitious prosecutor thrust themselves into the case. The prosecutor, Frederick Katzmann, secured a conviction against Vanzetti in Judge Webster Thayer's court on a charge of an attempted robbery that had occurred the previous Christmas Eve. But the real trial was yet to come.
In 1971, an Italian filmmaker named Giuliano Montaldo made a film that focused heavily on the second trial. In a fresh and exciting documentary fashion, Sacco & Vanzetti opens in stark black and white, giving a fast recap of the events leading up to the robbery and murders. Watching the movie today, it is easy to see the influence of this filmmaker on a young Oliver Stone when the latter created JFKtwenty years later. We witness actions by the players in this real life drama from the point of view of the director, as well as from other participants, the narrative running ahead and slamming brakes, hopping back and spinning wildly, yet holding together through the nearly exhausting talent of the actors on the screen. Riccardo Cucciolla plays Sacco. Since that name probably means nothing to you, perhaps think of a young Tony Shalhoub. His character's timidity and outrage make him simultaneously sympathetic and dangerous without the raving sentimentality or melodrama those terms normally imply. The closest we get to cheap emotion is when Sacco's wife is looking for their son Dante while Nicola is being herded into a paddy wagon. We perceive his helplessness and feel his relief when the boy turns up wandering through the crowd.
It is, however, the fierceness of actor Gian Maria Volonte who, as Vanzetti, draws in the camera on every scene in which he appears. Tall, with a lecherous mustache, he also exhibits a sophistication that his character apparently did indeed possess. This is a man who would frighten people like Palmer and Edgar Hoover just by walking down the street on a sunny day.
Montaldo's film does an amazing job of recreating the flamboyant racism of Katzmann's prosecution of the two Italians as defense witness after witness is discredited due to a language barrier or nationality.
The components of the actual evidence were hardly demonstrative in and of themselves to warrant the conviction and subsequent death sentences handed down by the incompetent judge. But matters went far beyond mere incompetence. The firearms evidence was consistently tampered with and the only way this kind of nonsense could happen in America today would be if we were in the midst of some type of war on terrorism that resulted in American lives being at risk overseas, or with special renditions, or with the accused being denied proper legal representation. That, of course, is the source of the continuing relevance and downright popular fascination with this case.
In 2006, director Peter Miller released a real documentary about the case. This film, Sacco and Vanzetti (without the ampersand), gives us moving voice-overs by Tony Shalhoub and John Turturro reading letters written by the title characters from their prison cells. But the real force of this presentation comes from the historians, of all people. These folks, especially Howard Zinn and Mary Anne Trasciatti, tell the story in a way that makes contemporary the grief of the travesty of justice that resulted in the execution of these two men. The audience is also struck by the courage of Sacco and especially Vanzetti as they face a future they cannot help but understand all too well.
One of the most ironic elements in the film comes near the end when the daughter of one of the robbery victims recalls how she was in a college English class when the professor handed out poems for the members of the class to read aloud. She was given--apparently by accident--a poem written by Edna St. Vincent Mallay called "Justice Denied in Massachusetts." After class, one of the daughter's classmates told the instructor who the young lady was. His horror can only be imagined.
Let us abandon then our gardens and go home
And sit in the sitting-room
Shall the larkspur blossom or the corn grow under this cloud?
Sour to the fruitful seed
Is the cold earth under this cloud,
Fostering quack and weed, we have marched upon but cannot
conquer;
We have bent the blades of our hoes against the stalks of them.
Let us go home, and sit in the sitting room.
Not in our day
Shall the cloud go over and the sun rise as before,
Beneficent upon us
Out of the glittering bay,
And the warm winds be blown inward from the sea
Moving the blades of corn
With a peaceful sound.
Forlorn, forlorn,
Stands the blue hay-rack by the empty mow.
And the petals drop to the ground,
Leaving the tree unfruited.
The sun that warmed our stooping backs and withered the weed
uprooted--
We shall not feel it again.
We shall die in darkness, and be buried in the rain.
What from the splendid dead
We have inherited --
Furrows sweet to the grain, and the weed subdued --
See now the slug and the mildew plunder.
Evil does overwhelm
The larkspur and the corn;
We have seen them go under.
Let us sit here, sit still,
Here in the sitting-room until we die;
At the step of Death on the walk, rise and go;
Leaving to our children's children the beautiful doorway,
And this elm,
And a blighted earth to till
With a broken hoe.
