SACCO E VANZETTI
Sog.: Fabrizio Onofri, Giuliano Montaldo, Mino Roli. Scen.: Fabrizio Onofri, Giuliano Montaldo, Ottavio Jemma. F.: Silvano Ippoliti. M.: Nino Baragli. Scgf.: Aurelio Crugnola. Mus.. Ennio Morricone. Int.: Gian Maria Volonté (Bartolomeo Vanzetti), Riccardo Cucciolla (Nicola Sacco), Cyril Cusack (procuratore Frederick Katzman), Rosanna Fratello (Rosa Sacco), Milo O’Shea (avvocato Moore), William Prince (avvocato Thompson), Claude Mann (Rennie), Geoffrey Keen (giudice Webster Thayer), Sergio Fantoni (console Giuseppe Adrower), Armenia Balducci (Virginia). Prod.: Arrigo Colombo, Giorgio Papi per Jolly Film, Unidis, Théâtre le Rex. DCP. D.: 125’. Col.
Film Notes
To be included in a list of State crimes aspiring to the status of tragedy is undoubtedly the sentencing to death of the two anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti on 23rd August, 1927, in the United States of America. […] Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent; and as a result of the ideas they professed and their demeanour throughout the course of the trial, they became emblematic figures for oppressed and poor people around the world. Thus, the consciously fabricated judicial error, relying on the anonymity of the two victims, instead revealed the true nature of this tragedy as a state crime.
From the story of the two anarchists, Giuliano Montaldo has extracted a film, Sacco e Vanzetti, both a documented tribute to the memory of two martyrs, and an in-depth investigation into the social and political complexities that led a capitalist society to convict two persons who opposed the institution of private property of a crime against property itself. […]
With great efficiency, Montaldo has been able to reconstruct the environment surrounding the two anarchists and the different phases of the trial, and in so doing has succeeded in ensuring that the exemplary nature of the characters does not erase their individual humanity. […] The director has managed to provoke without rhetoric, attain truth without hyperbole. The film’s great strength lies in the admirable interpretations, of unusual intensity and bravura, of Vanzetti and Sacco by Gian Maria Volonté and Riccardo Cucciolla, who seem to have stepped into the film from Ben Shahn’s famous paintings.
Alberto Moravia, Lo zio Sam sotto la toga, in “L’Espresso”, 28th March 1971
At the end of the 1960s, and with the events of ’68, various new and different types of unrest are created, leaving everyone a little shaken. Then a strange reflux occurs in the years ’72-’73, suffocating these movements and their spontaneity. I believe that Sacco e Vanzetti is in some way the flagship film for this generation. It suffices to think of the continued success of Joan Baez’s song in the years immediately following the film’s release.
Giuliano Montaldo
Restored in 2017 by Unidis Jolly Film, Cineteca di Bologna, Cinecittà Luce in collaboration with Rai Cinema and Amnesty International Italia at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory from the original camera negative and the Italian and English sound negative. A vintage positive first generation print was used as a reference for color grading. The director Giuliano Montaldo personally supervised the restoration