The American judical system has a long and spotted history of convicting and executing those whose political views defy the status quo. One most notorious such trial was that of Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and admitted anarchists who were convicted and sent to the electric chair as a result of the 1920s red scare. Cucciolla and Volonte portray the duo, who are brought up on charges of murder when two employees of a shoe store are killed in a robbery. After a sham trial in which Cucciolla and Volonte are tried more for their politics than for the actual crime, they are found guilty and sentenced to death. The case caused worldwide commotion as literally thousands of people rally behind them over the course of the next six years. The film is at its strongest when allowed to simply speak for itself. This is a story fraught with natural emotion, portrayed with sincerity and genuine sympathy for its doomed protagonists. In the end, Sacco and Vanzetti becomes an eloquent portrait of two simple men swept up in the fury of political self-righteousness, a portrait which is not flattering to the American way of justice, to say the least. The film is sometimes accurate, sometimes biased and sometimes even fictional in its telling of the story, but no matter. The versions of the "truth" in the Sacco-Vanzetti case are so various, anyway, that a factual retelling would probably be beyond the capabilities of a feature film. Sacco and Vanzetti are beyond being helped by any film, for that matter, and the purpose of this film, like Z and The Murder of Fred Hampton, is more to alert us to how law can be used as a blunt instrument of politics.
