Tell Me the Old, Old Story

Inevitably someone was bound to make a film about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and my only surprise on seeing Giuliano Montaldo’s current version is that something of the kind had not been done decades earlier. Nine years ago Dino De Laurentiis was planning his own Sacco-Vanzetti venture. I tried to persuade him at the time to have some regard for the actualities, since after the 1961 ballistics tests, after the mounting doubts that Fred Moore as chief defense counsel had expressed about the innocence of his clients, after the anarchist leader Carlo Tresca’s flat admission of Sacco’s guilt, it was no longer possible to hold to the dogma of two guileless philosophical anarchists done to death by a corrupt and fearful capitalist society. Whereupon one of De Laurentiis’ many aides de cine argued that even so, what David Felix in his study of the intellectuals and the case had called “the myth of innocence betrayed” had become so firmly established as a liberal belief that it would be undesirable to challenge it. De Laurentiis then imported a Hollywood writer, Edward Anhalt, and gave him three months to prepare the script he had in mind. Anhalt’s version was of the shoemaker-philosopher with his wife and child in their rose-bowered bungalow. “Just a love-nest, cozy and warm!” Into this proletarian paradise come the hounds of hell, harriers of innocent Red dreamers and philosophical radicals. Anhalt crossed each T and dotted every I of the myth, giving special attention to Rosina Sacco since she was to be played by Dino’s wife. For some months De Laurentiis’ New York office had its postage meters reading: SEE SACCO AND VANZETTI. Then for some reason the whole project was junked.

A year ago this past summer when Montaldo was in this country getting background material for his Sacco-Vanzetti film, I tried to persuade him to make a semi-documentary that would be true to all the known facts, without

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Francis Russell

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Inevitably someone was bound to make a film about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and my only surprise on seeing Giuliano Montaldo’s current version is that something of the kind had not been done decades earlier. Nine years ago Dino De Laurentiis was planning his own Sacco-Vanzetti venture. I tried to persuade him at the time to have some regard for the actualities, since after the 1961 ballistics tests, after the mounting doubts that Fred Moore as chief defense counsel had expressed about the innocence of his clients, after the anarchist leader Carlo Tresca’s flat admission of Sacco’s guilt, it was no longer possible to hold to the dogma of two guileless philosophical anarchists done to death by a corrupt and fearful capitalist society. Whereupon one of De Laurentiis’ many aides de cine argued that even so, what David Felix in his study of the intellectuals and the case had called “the myth of innocence betrayed” had become so firmly established as a liberal belief that it would be undesirable to challenge it. De Laurentiis then imported a Hollywood writer, Edward Anhalt, and gave him three months to prepare the script he had in mind. Anhalt’s version was of the shoemaker-philosopher with his wife and child in their rose-bowered bungalow. “Just a love-nest, cozy and warm!” Into this proletarian paradise come the hounds of hell, harriers of innocent Red dreamers and philosophical radicals. Anhalt crossed each T and dotted every I of the myth, giving special attention to Rosina Sacco since she was to be played by Dino’s wife. For some months De Laurentiis’ New York office had its postage meters reading: SEE SACCO AND VANZETTI. Then for some reason the whole project was junked.

A year ago this past summer when Montaldo was in this country getting background material for his Sacco-Vanzetti film, I tried to persuade him to make a semi-documentary that would be true to all the known facts, without