Winter hill evening in America
New film highlights private lives of anarchist martyrs
by Denis Greenan .
(ANSA) - Salerno, November 13 - Leftwing Italian martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti have come to life again in a new Italian TV film .
The two-part film on Premier Silvio Berlusconi's flagship Canale 5 channel stars top Italian actors Sergio Rubini and Ennio Fantastichini as the two Italian anarchists whose murder trial became a worldwide cause celebre in the 1920s. It recreates the anti-immigrant and anti-leftist climate of the time, while portraying the main characters in intimate detail .
"We chose to privilege the human and emotional perspective of the affair, to tell the dreams and emotions with which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti arrived in America, and the complexity of the daily life of immigrants at that troubled but heroic historical period," the film-makers said on the Canale 5 website .
"We've made a non-political film with a lot of politics in it," said Pietro Calderoni and Gualtiero Rosella, admitting it was hard to "break new ground" compared to a cult movie from the early '70s .
They said the film was "a story of love and friendship - feelings born by chance but defended up to their final sacrifice." .
Rubini (Sacco), whose credits include Fellini's Intervista, abriele Salvatores' Nirvana and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, said: "Nothing has changed since that period. We've forgotten what we were 80 years ago. A few days ago I saw a photo of an immigrant captioned 'the new barbarians'." .
He added: "I've always seen Sacco as somehow part of the family because I've always been fascinated by the story of my grandfather who made his fortune selling ice in America and had to marry my grandma by proxy." Fantastichini, who has played St.Peter, Napoleon's brother and slain Italian Mafia-buster Giovanni Falcone in recent TV movies, said: "Let's hope kids see the movie because it talks about brotherhood in a country which some people want to split between north and south." .
The actor, who is of peasant stock like the heroes, said he had looked to his late friend Gian Maria Volonte', star of the 1971 film, for inspiration on how to play Vanzetti .
The new TV film was presented without fanfare but to critical acclaim in the TV section of this summer's Venice Film Festival .
Berlusconi's Mediaset group is hoping to sell foreign rights worldwide. To coincide with the two-part mini-serial, expected to draw a huge audience on Sunday and Monday nights, a tiny publishing house near Salerno is reissuing Bartolomeo Vanzetti's book Una Vita Proletaria (A Proletarian Life) .
The Galzerano Press in the small town of Casalvelino was the first - and so far only - publisher to put out the biography in 1987 .
This second edition will include Vanzetti's last letters from prison to family and friends and his last public statement before he was sentenced to death .
THE CASE .
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested after the murder of two shoe factory employees in a payroll heist south of Boston in 1920 .
The arrests came at the height of America's 1919-1920 'Red Scare', the most intense period of political repression in America's history. Prosecutors claimed the two robbed the factory to fund their political activities .
Witnesses said the gunmen had "looked Italian." .
The only evidence against them was that they were carrying guns when they were arrested .
They both had solid alibis - Vanzetti was selling fish in nearby Plymouth and Sacco was having his photo taken with his wife in central Boston .
The prosecution made a great deal of the fact that all the corroborating witnesses were Italian .
Police rejected a 1925 confession by a Portuguese immigrant who implicated members of a notorious Italo-American gang. The two anarchists were sentenced to the electric chair in 1921 and executed on August 23, 1927 - despite a vocal worldwide campaign against their deaths .
In America, luminaries like physicist Albert Einstein and writers John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker published articles in support of the men .
They were joined across the Atlantic by philosopher Bertrand Russell and writers George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells .
There were huge protest marches in London, Paris, Mexico City and Buenos Aires .
Famous poet Edna St Vincent Millay wrote an elegy on their deaths .
Much later, the two became icons for the post-1968 generation. Joan Baez wrote a song about them .
OTHER FILMS, POSTHUMOUS PARDON .
The Canale 5 movie is the first filmed account of the men's last years since the 1971 film by Giuliano Montaldo, which earned a Cannes Best Actor Award for Volonte's co-star Riccardo Cucciolla .
Before that, there was a 1960 US mini-film directed by Sydney Lumet and starring Martin Balsam .
There have also been two German films on the affair, in 1927 and 1963, and a French one in 1967. In 1997 Sacco and Vanzetti finally received official recognition from Boston when a monument by Mt. Rushmore architect Gutzon Borglum was erected in the city .
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, an ethnic Italian, said: "Our accepting this work of art is an acknowledgement on the part of the city that these two men did not get a fair trial." .
Twenty years earlier, in 1977, then Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis rehabilitated them, removing "all stigma or stain from their names." .
EXECUTION, LAST WORDS .
On 23rd August 1927, the day of the men's execution, over 250,000 people took part in a silent demonstration in Boston .
In his last statement to the court, Vanzetti said: "I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical, I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian, I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself. "But I am so convinced I am right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already"." Shortly before, he told a reporter: "If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. "Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident. "Our words - our lives - our pains - nothing! The taking of our lives - lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler - all! That last moment belongs to us - that agony is our triumph." .
by Denis Greenan .
(ANSA) - Salerno, November 13 - Leftwing Italian martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti have come to life again in a new Italian TV film .
The two-part film on Premier Silvio Berlusconi's flagship Canale 5 channel stars top Italian actors Sergio Rubini and Ennio Fantastichini as the two Italian anarchists whose murder trial became a worldwide cause celebre in the 1920s. It recreates the anti-immigrant and anti-leftist climate of the time, while portraying the main characters in intimate detail .
"We chose to privilege the human and emotional perspective of the affair, to tell the dreams and emotions with which Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti arrived in America, and the complexity of the daily life of immigrants at that troubled but heroic historical period," the film-makers said on the Canale 5 website .
"We've made a non-political film with a lot of politics in it," said Pietro Calderoni and Gualtiero Rosella, admitting it was hard to "break new ground" compared to a cult movie from the early '70s .
They said the film was "a story of love and friendship - feelings born by chance but defended up to their final sacrifice." .
Rubini (Sacco), whose credits include Fellini's Intervista, abriele Salvatores' Nirvana and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, said: "Nothing has changed since that period. We've forgotten what we were 80 years ago. A few days ago I saw a photo of an immigrant captioned 'the new barbarians'." .
He added: "I've always seen Sacco as somehow part of the family because I've always been fascinated by the story of my grandfather who made his fortune selling ice in America and had to marry my grandma by proxy." Fantastichini, who has played St.Peter, Napoleon's brother and slain Italian Mafia-buster Giovanni Falcone in recent TV movies, said: "Let's hope kids see the movie because it talks about brotherhood in a country which some people want to split between north and south." .
The actor, who is of peasant stock like the heroes, said he had looked to his late friend Gian Maria Volonte', star of the 1971 film, for inspiration on how to play Vanzetti .
The new TV film was presented without fanfare but to critical acclaim in the TV section of this summer's Venice Film Festival .
Berlusconi's Mediaset group is hoping to sell foreign rights worldwide. To coincide with the two-part mini-serial, expected to draw a huge audience on Sunday and Monday nights, a tiny publishing house near Salerno is reissuing Bartolomeo Vanzetti's book Una Vita Proletaria (A Proletarian Life) .
The Galzerano Press in the small town of Casalvelino was the first - and so far only - publisher to put out the biography in 1987 .
This second edition will include Vanzetti's last letters from prison to family and friends and his last public statement before he was sentenced to death .
THE CASE .
Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested after the murder of two shoe factory employees in a payroll heist south of Boston in 1920 .
The arrests came at the height of America's 1919-1920 'Red Scare', the most intense period of political repression in America's history. Prosecutors claimed the two robbed the factory to fund their political activities .
Witnesses said the gunmen had "looked Italian." .
The only evidence against them was that they were carrying guns when they were arrested .
They both had solid alibis - Vanzetti was selling fish in nearby Plymouth and Sacco was having his photo taken with his wife in central Boston .
The prosecution made a great deal of the fact that all the corroborating witnesses were Italian .
Police rejected a 1925 confession by a Portuguese immigrant who implicated members of a notorious Italo-American gang. The two anarchists were sentenced to the electric chair in 1921 and executed on August 23, 1927 - despite a vocal worldwide campaign against their deaths .
In America, luminaries like physicist Albert Einstein and writers John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker published articles in support of the men .
They were joined across the Atlantic by philosopher Bertrand Russell and writers George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells .
There were huge protest marches in London, Paris, Mexico City and Buenos Aires .
Famous poet Edna St Vincent Millay wrote an elegy on their deaths .
Much later, the two became icons for the post-1968 generation. Joan Baez wrote a song about them .
OTHER FILMS, POSTHUMOUS PARDON .
The Canale 5 movie is the first filmed account of the men's last years since the 1971 film by Giuliano Montaldo, which earned a Cannes Best Actor Award for Volonte's co-star Riccardo Cucciolla .
Before that, there was a 1960 US mini-film directed by Sydney Lumet and starring Martin Balsam .
There have also been two German films on the affair, in 1927 and 1963, and a French one in 1967. In 1997 Sacco and Vanzetti finally received official recognition from Boston when a monument by Mt. Rushmore architect Gutzon Borglum was erected in the city .
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, an ethnic Italian, said: "Our accepting this work of art is an acknowledgement on the part of the city that these two men did not get a fair trial." .
Twenty years earlier, in 1977, then Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis rehabilitated them, removing "all stigma or stain from their names." .
EXECUTION, LAST WORDS .
On 23rd August 1927, the day of the men's execution, over 250,000 people took part in a silent demonstration in Boston .
In his last statement to the court, Vanzetti said: "I am suffering because I am a radical and indeed I am a radical, I have suffered because I was an Italian, and indeed I am an Italian, I have suffered more for my family and for my beloved than for myself. "But I am so convinced I am right that if you could execute me two times, and if I could be reborn two other times, I would live again to do what I have done already"." Shortly before, he told a reporter: "If it had not been for this thing, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. I might have died, unmarked, unknown, a failure. "Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life can we hope to do such work for tolerance, justice, for man's understanding of man, as now we do by accident. "Our words - our lives - our pains - nothing! The taking of our lives - lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler - all! That last moment belongs to us - that agony is our triumph." .
posted by professor rat at 9:03 AM
<< Home