Cinema: Moving Myth

All right we are two nations

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums . . .

It has the staccato ring of a contemporary editorial, but the words are from John Dos Passos' U.S.A., circa 1936. The outburst was triggered by the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists accused of a Massachusetts robbery and killing, and tried in the atmosphere of '20s xenophobia.

The attempts to save these men gave moral impetus to the American Left, and they still exert a powerful undertow in Sacco and Vanzetti, an Italian film. Sacco, a fishmonger, and Vanzetti, a shoemaker, have always been simultaneously visible and obscure, martyrs but not men. As played by Gian Maria Volonte and Riccardo Cucciolla, they are credible and pathetic—good, bewildered souls whom history has scorched by its proximity. As they watch themselves railroaded to the electric chair, they shout in anger, then grow numb, and finally reach a plane of philosophy that forgives their executioners and redeems their adopted country. Director Giuliano Montaldo reconstructs the trial as if it were a kangaroo court and treats the men like innocents. This version makes dramatic sense, but it is, unfortunately, at odds with the truth. In a painstakingly researched book, Tragedy in Dedham, Francis Russell proved nine years ago that Nicola Sacco was indeed implicated in the murder of which he was accused. "Beyond everything else," wrote Russell, "we know that the passionately held belief that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent philosophical anarchists done to death by a reactionary and fearful capitalist society is, after all, a myth."

It is a myth with shadings of tragedy: accusation, trial, death and catharsis. It is well to remember, however, that while Sacco and Vanzetti were real men, their film biography is not the quasi documentary it pretends to be but a moving, even cataclysmic fiction.