Last Saturday I pondered a bit on political plays and on Jim Allen’s Perdition.
Today I feel like shedding some brief notes on one of my favourite political films, Giuliano Montaldo’s Sacco and Vanzetti (1971) and on the story of anarchist Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, interpreted in the film by Riccardo Cucciolla and the great Gian Maria Volonté.
I still remember watching this film many years ago during the Flaiano Film Festival in my hometown, Pescara, in a theatre room full of people.
Gian Maria Volontè’s speech (see extracts from YouTube in this post - sorry but I only found it in Italian) moved us to tears, but by the time we heard Joan Baez singing "Here’s to You", on Morricone’s music, we were all clapping and crying.
Over 80 years after their deaths, historians are still discussing about whether Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty or innocent of the murders of two men shot in 1920 in South Braintree, Massachusetts, during a payroll robbery.
One thing is certain and that’s the fact that their trial was riddled by anti-immigrant prejudice that was ripe at the time, especially against foreigners with anarchic, communist or socialist affiliations.
Despite the case happened so long ago, Sacco and Vanzetti’s lives and deaths still matter: they represent a story of immigration and remind us of the hostility generated anytime there is a new flow of immigrants to a country, but it’s also a story of political and radical ideals conceived while bomb attacks were carried out against U.S. government officials and the police forces were answering back with retaliatory raids.
Think about what’s going on nowadays in the world and you will find similar situations to the one Sacco and Vanzetti lived in, but in different contexts.
The rise of anti-immigration feelings, fear of terrorism and radicalism, shooting of suspected terrorists, miscarriages of justice and the denial of workers’ rights, sadly play a larger role every day in our lives.
Even the Italian government's threatened legal action and investigations against the “Let's Kill Berlusconi” Facebook page – now renamed “Berlusconi Go Away” – made me think about Sacco and Vanzetti (it's highly unlikely you could reform an extremist terrorist group via Facebook, don’t you think so?, yet everything is useful when you want to distract the attention from more important matters...).
This is why Sacco and Vanzetti’s story may still teach us something and why we should treasure their sufferings, sorrows, mistakes, defeats, passion for future battles and for the great emancipation - to paraphrase one of their last letters.I want to leave you with something inspirational for this weekend, an extract from Nicola Sacco’s heartfelt letter to his son, written before being executed: “…remember always, Dante, in the play of happiness, don’t you use all for yourself only, but down yourself just one step (…) help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends (…) in this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.”
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