...And on Screen

By all 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.

What makes the failure of the film all the more disconcerting is that Sacco and Vanzetti deserved so much better. Anyone who reads the transcript of the trial cannot fail to be struck by the purity of motive (particularly in the case of Vanzetti) that inspired their anarchist belief. If Montaldo had been less carried away by his own enthusiasms, if he had been content to let the critical moments (Vanzetti's last speech at the trial, the execution sequence) stand by themselves, the film would have succeeded, if only on the strength of the appeal of the historical characters themselves.

Montaldo is generally faithful to historical documentation. But toward the end of the film, he makes one unforgiveable addition that undermines the entire thrust of his argument. He invents a scene between Vanzetti and Massachusetts Governor Fuller in which the convicted anarchist is asked to justify his request for a reprieve from the electric chair. During the course of their conversation, Fuller reveals that it is ultimately a political consideration--beyond any question of guilt or innocence--that makes it impossible to grant Vanzetti's request. Vanzetti is an anarchist; anarchists cannot be tolerated; Vanzetti must die. At this point any pretences to subtlety are abandoned, and Montaldo surrenders himself to moralizing. Despite dubious historical validity, he implies a governmental conspiracy behind the conviction.

This 'correction' of historical fact amounts to an admission that accuracy would not possess sufficient emotional value. And this is patently absurd. There is absolutely no dramatic reason to reach beyond history. But Montaldo seems unsure of the clarity of his position, and thus tacks on this utterly superfluous moral summation.

Finally, Montaldo succumbs to sentimentalism. He mistakes the particular historical event for a general moral principle. He wrongly assumes the necessity of 'proving' the anarchists' innocence and the conspiracy of the government in order to substantiate his charges. What Montaldo does not realize is that it finally does not matter whether the legal tactics in the trial were unethical or whether or not there was a conspiracy. In the end it dose not current matter whether Sacco 'Vanzetti were, in fact, guilty or innocent. No matter what the reality behind that trial, the crimes of the American government are beyond dispute. And if evidence should one day appear indicating the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti after all, that would not change one whit the fact of American intolerance in the twenties. Racism and repression existed--beyond any question of the trial of two anarchists. These are the crimes, and they are incontestable, no matter who fired the shots in .