the audience applauded

People are voting emotionally.

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

I think these political ideas no longer exist in the present time ; Now many people know it is not necessary to adhere to a particular policy to claim your right to economic prosperity and your right to express opinion but for the time when these events took place these two simple factors had only one chance belonging to one of the political groups that can achieve their ideas for some liberation from the owners of capital and this movement was anarchist . As a viewer I do not know about anarchism except for some surface information which made me feel a bit alienated in the details of the film ; In general than I had read about them they did not believe in institutions or any governmental supervision ; for example the anarchist was calling for the cancellation of teachers from schools and that the student is responsible for the collection of his own science ; despite the absurdity of these ideas it is said that there are some names that have a good reputation such as the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy who believe these ideas . The problem of Sacco and Vanzetti were facing political system which wanted to destroy these ideas which meant destroying Sacco and Vanzetti ..

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.

My comment could not possibly add anything to the ones already available. I just want to say that the latest scandal in this story is that the film has not been made available on DVD ! Is there a conspiracy still going on to prevent such films from being watched by new generations ? I am exasperated to see that thousands of trash films are published on DVD every month while such masterpieces are still ignored. Sacco e Vanzetti reaches far beyond the subject of the two anarchists ignominiously put to death in a misconducted trial. The ghosts of the two men are still behind every prejudiced account by the media, every lie by politicians all over the world. It calls for better institutions, better democracy all over the world. The fact that so many film buffs bothered to express their admiration for this outstanding movie should entice a publisher to make this film at last available. I have kept checking for years, but nothing so far.

Yes, I too, remember seeing this film around thirty years ago, when it was first released. I remember it as a very, very good film, made all the better by suberb acting from both Riccardo Cucciola and Gian Maria Volonte (better remembered as the psycopathic 'Indio' in 'For a few Dollars More') and the absolutely brilliant score by Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez. While most reviews criticise the judgement and death of the two men and their subsequent posthumous pardons, did I not read somewhere or other that recent ballistic tests on the weapons proved that the gun found on Nicola Sacco was the gun used to murder the payroll guards ? I might be wrong and there again, I might not. None the less, a great film.