Sacco & Vanzetti

Massachusetts, 1920. Two Italian immigrant anarchists, the shoemaker Nicola Sacco and the fish seller Bartolomeo Vanzetti, are charged with robbery and murder. Across seven years of proceedings the evidence weakens and the outcome does not change. Both were executed in 1927. Giuliano Montaldo directs. Gian Maria Volonté plays Vanzetti and Riccardo Cucciolla plays Sacco. Cucciolla won best actor at Cannes in 1971 for it. The film's claim is that what was on trial was not a robbery but the politics and the immigrant identity of two men. Passages taken from the trial record make that directly: the judge's conduct and the emphasis placed on their anarchism are the strongest material in it. Ennio Morricone wrote the music. Here's to You, sung by Joan Baez with lyrics drawn from Vanzetti's final statement, became a protest song independent of the film and is far better known than the film itself. The case returned in 1977, when the governor of Massachusetts formally declared that Sacco and Vanzetti had not received a fair trial. The film's contribution to that process is widely acknowledged. Who it is for: viewers who like political cinema, Italian film of the seventies, and films built on real trials. Who it is not for: the film takes a side and does not hide it. The innocence of the two men is not argued, it is assumed.