Product: Sacco & Vanzetti
Rating: 2.0
Turn about is fair play
SACCO AND VANZETTI is not a terribly good movie, but it provides an interesting object lesson for American viewers. Although Hollywood has never had any compunction about turning the whole world's history into a highly Americanized struggle between good and evil, foreign films about America's past are pretty rare. If for no other reason than to see how another society views us, films like S&V are worth watching. The fact that the film dramatizes one of our less enlightened moments makes it that much more interesting.I don't know enough about the Sacco and Vanzetti trial to assess the film's treatment of it, but the filmmakers certainly make no effort to conceal their prejudices. Given when it was made (1971), at the height of Radical Chic, it is hardly surprising that they indict the system that condemned the two Italian-American anarchists. Both are portrayed as helpless innocents. Riccardo Cucciolla's Sacco particularly exudes the saintly aura of all New Left victims. The director, Guiliano Montaldo, is no Pontecorvo or Bertolucci or Rosi. He doesn't have the gift of making leftist politics ravishingly beautiful, but he's a competent hypester who knows how to keep things jumping. He's helped considerably by Gian Maria Volonte's powerful presence as Vanzetti. (Volonte is probably best known to American audiences for his villainous performances in the first two Leone/Eastwood spaghetti westerns, first as Ramón, Eastwood's chief antagonist in FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, then as Indio, the psychopathic bank robber in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE. He was also the lead in Elio Petri's INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION.)I don't know where S&V was shot. At a guess, probably Italy and England. With one or two exceptions, there isn't a location in it that feels remotely like Massachusetts, but that's what makes the film fascinating. It may be wildly inaccurate--but what does that say about American movies set in other countries? If we assume that the people who made this are serious, talented individuals (and why doubt it?), then we have to conclude that the distortions we pick up in an American subject merely reflect similar distortions Hollywood imposes on the rest of the world. Or, to put it differently, there is no reason to believe that Italians have a monopoly on short-sighted, provincial visions of other countries. Remember that the next time you watch an American movie about World War II and all the Germans speak English with German accents.