Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

Michelle Ridley The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Eumenides_0 My current obsession with Italian actor Gian Maria Volonté eventually brought me to Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco and Vanzetti, an excellent courtroom drama where Volonté and Riccardo Cucciolla play two anarchists unjustly tried for murder, while it becomes obvious they're in fact being tried for being anarchists, lefties, reds, whatever, in a country that never had any love for them, and in a time that was perhaps the second worst time to be an anarchist/communist/socialist in America after the McCarthy years. This movie is set a few decades before that, but the hysteria and strident violation of civil rights is the same.Montaldo does a good job directing the movie - for instance the black-and-white opening sequence, with the cops making a raid on an Italian neighbourhood, rounding up men, women and children in front of their buildings, spanking innocent people, and basically acting like vicious animals, is a powerful sequence that immediately sets the theme of abuse of power. Then we have the courtroom scenes, with Cyril Cusack playing a fierce DA seeking to send the two anarchists to the electric chair, Geoffrey Keen playing a clearly bigoted judge, and Milo O'Shea as the defense lawyer who is systematically humiliated, bullied and discredited because he's doing his job too well. When these three actors share a scene you can see sparks fly off the screen! Ennio Morricone provides the music, which is melancholy and elegiac, and Joan Baez contributes with some excellent ballads that are positioned in key moments of the movie. These two together make the score for this movie one of the best I've ever heard.Gian Maria Volonté is of course excellent: his performance is showier and more furious than Cucciolla's. But then their characters also have different personalities. Whereas Volonté's character, Vanzetti, understands the mythical dimension of his person, realizes that his death will turn him into a symbol of freedom for the new generations, and he's fine with that, Cucciolla plays Sacco, an ordinary man who wants to live and who is having trouble accepting his new condition as a man charged with murder. Cucciolla received a prize in Cannes for his performance in this movie over Volonté and I have to say it wasn't undeserved. His subdued, reserved performance was the right touch that makes him the focus point of the viewer's sympathies.Sacco and Vanzetti is a great movie, a beautiful movie, that tells an interesting episode about American history that is often ignored - the racism, discrimination and suspicion against immigrants. Like any other country, the USA has an official history that is more mythology than truth, that is inevitable to all nations in their construction of a national identity, but I'm glad there will always be movies like these to continue to deflate the myths and reveal the truth. I just hope there will always be viewers for them too.

JasparLamarCrabb Extremely well acted but terribly put together film of one of America's most shameful injustices. Gian Maria Volonté and Riccardo Cucciolla portray the doomed anarchists in director Giuliano Montaldo's production. It suffers from what appears to be a serious lack of location work (it rarely even appears that events are taking place in the US) and Montaldo's direction is surprisingly lifeless. There's no feeling of what the country was going through during the politically turbulent 1920s, when anarchists, communists and other radicals were being deported en masse. The film relies on courtroom proceedings that are confusing rather than enlightening. Volonté and Cucciolla, as well as Cyril Cusack as a wily DA are excellent as are Milo O'Shea and William Prince as the Sacco & Vanzetti's first and second lawyers. Ennio Morricone's score is terrific, marred at times by poorly placed folk songs by Joan Baez.

sacco vanzetti Frank McGurk "Guilty or Innocent???" for writing a WRONG comment?I quote with correction:"recent ballistic tests on the weapons proved that the gun found on Nicola Sacco was NOT (NO-NEIN) the gun used to murder the payroll guards"!Be careful guys... ...if you don't want roll injustice over and over again...N.B. If also not so, remember that the real guilty man confessed his crime. But the court refuse to admit his confession, because he was already put to death for other crimes.take care

hooshi Magnificent rendition of the people, circumstances and atmosphere surrounding the infamous "Palmer Raids", the paranoia of the keepers of law and order and the status quo, and of course the frame-up of Sacco and Vanzetti.It is worthwhile to know that the governor of Massachussets recently exonerated Sacco and Vanzetti, calling their trial a shameful mark on the face of American judiciary system.