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SACCO AND VANZETTI
Directed by: Peter Miller.
Produced by: Miller & Amy Carey Linton.
Director of Photography: Stephen McCarthy.
Edited by: Linton.
Released by: First Run Features.
Country of Origin: USA. 81 min. Not Rated.

The infamous trial of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti continues to fascinate. The two anarchists were executed for the robbery and murder of a factory paymaster and his guard in South Braintree, MA. Historians, including documentary regular Howard Zinn, tear apart the Massachusetts’ case against the men: the unreliability of the supposed eyewitnesses to the shooting; the exclusion of the confession by a member of a local crime gang who knew specific and publicly unknown details about the crimes; and not least of all, the prejudicial comments made by Webster Thayer, the trial’s judge.

But director Peter Miller’s main objection is to bring the past into the present with interviews reiterating issues of civil liberties vs. national security. Both men were followers of Luigi Galleani, who advocated in his writings the violent overthrow of the state, believing the government committed worse crimes than his movement ever could; one of his followers was killed in the attempted assassination of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in 1919. In the words of Zinn, the government panicked, giving rise to the 1920 Red Scare in which hundreds of politically undesirables were deported. Fortunately, Miller lets many of the inferences hang in the air, letting the viewer connect the dots. In fact, the measured tone, though understatedly indignant regarding the miscarriage of justice, will likely draw viewers into the conversation.

Apart from the armchair arguments, the film visually reminds the viewer the events of eight decades earlier are not so distant. Back in Sacco’s native Puglia, his now elderly niece recounts her family history; one man remembers attending at age 13 a rally protesting the trial’s verdict; and another elderly woman recalls a college instructor asking her to read aloud Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem, Justice Denied in Massachusetts, not knowing her student was the daughter of the slain paymaster. (However, a nondescript strip mall now occupies the once-industrial crime site.) Kent Turner
March 25, 2007