5/5 Insightful view of a seminal event in American history
  by VDK (Atlanta, GA USA)
This is an insightful documentary that gives audiences a multi-faceted view of a seminal event in American history -- one that still reverberates today. The film deconstructs the entire S&V case by giving us commentary by scholars, neighbors and eye witnesses. A nice touch is the expertly-edited clips from theatrical feature films, which breath new life into the traditional documentary format.

There is a wonderful grace note near the end where a letter, written by Sacco to his son just before his execution, is read as the video shows us beautiful bucolic scenes -- scenes that Sacco describes, but would never see again.

The film leaves us with a cautionary note - we the people must stay alert to attempts by those in power to use external threats as an excuse to clamp down on civil liberties.

Check out this film. You will not be disappointed.

3/5 historic film
  by Enrica Funari (Highland Park, New Jersey)
The movie was slow moving and kept repeating events and facts over when it was not necessary,,,unless you are forgetful. Did not care for the storyline.

4/5 With justice for all?
  by Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA)
Peter Miller's "Sacco and Vanzetti" is a fascinating film. It interviews informative people, the two actors who provide the "voices" of Sacco and Vanzetti are quite good, and the vintage stills and film clips are well selected. But ultimately, it seems to me, the film offers both too much and too little information.

The film can't quite figure out whether it wants to be a whodunnit or a social commentary, but ultimately leans toward the former. So we get an astounding and eventually tedious amount of information about the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti were finally executed--the homicidal robbery of a factory payclerk. Historians discuss at length ballistics, witness reliability, judicial bias, and bad legal representation, all to establish Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence.

But what gets lost in the film--and here's where it tells us too little-- are the two men themselves. We're given brief biographical sketches of them and a handful of snipped quotations from their letters, but their extensive and eloquent correspondence isn't drawn upon to provide a full portrait of the pair. Vanzetti is an introvert, Sacco a family man: the personal profiles don't go much beyond this, and are in sorry contrast to the richness of the available letters they left behind.

What the film excels in is putting the Sacco/Vanzetti trial in historical perspective. The interviews with Howard Zinn are particularly helpful in this regard. The US went through a horribly repressive red scare during and after WWI, and it's clear that the draconian illegal measures taken against political radicals were motivated in large part by political conservatism (with Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer being the villain here) as well as xenophobia in general and dislike of Italian immigrants in particular. Sacco and Vanzetti never had a chance in Judge Thayer's court or Palmer's America.

What the film most definitely fails in is balance. I have no doubt that Sacco and Vanzetti didn't receive a fair trial, and my social and political sympathies are with them rather than the establishment that executed them. But it's not at all clear that Sacco was innocent. If Max Eastman can be believed, Carlo Tresca once admitted that although Vanzetti was innocent, Sacco wasn't. Giovanni Gambera, who along with Sacco and Vanzetti was a follower of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani (an advocate, by the way, of revolutionary violence), said the same thing. This testimony by itself establishes nothing, but it's surprising that it (and other testimony that tilts away from Sacco's innocence) wasn't mentioned in the film.

Well worth seeing, nonetheless, both because the Sacco and Vanzetti case is important in its own right, but also because the injustice perpetrated against the two men is a cautionary tale for today.

5/5 Great documentary!
  by D. Schnitzlein
This is a well-researched documentary with expert editing and direction. It's a piece of history that is extremely relevant to modern times. Thought-provoking, entertaining, and more disturbing than any horror film you are likely to see this year. Don't miss this wonderful film!

4/5 a compelling history lesson
  by Roland E. Zwick (Valencia, Ca USA)
Long before Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafucco became household names and courtroom celebrities, long before Robert Blake and O.J. Simpson took to the stand in their own defense, there were Ferdinando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants whose highly-publicized murder trial electrified the nation and became one of the hot media sensations of the 1920's.

Shortly after coming to America, both Sacco and Vanzetti became involved with a group of socialist anarchists dedicated to eradicating (sometimes through the use of violence) the stark inequities of status and class they perceived in the society around them (an idea that did not go down well in a capitalist nation watching in horror the success of the then quite recent Bolshevik Revolution). On April 15, 1920, the pair was arrested for the murder of two men, a paymaster and a security guard, who were shot in cold-blood while transporting the payroll from a shoe factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. Even though there was no real evidence tying them to the killings, Sacco and Vanzetti were eventually placed on trial, convicted on charges of 1st degree murder, and put to death in the electric chair on August 23, 1927. In the years since, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti has gone down in history as one of the major miscarriages of justice in all of American jurist prudence, while their very names have become synonymous with a legal system that too often abandons its quality of disinterested objectivity in favor of bigotry, corruption and fear.

As directed by Peter Miller, the documentary, "Sacco and Vanzetti," attempts to come to terms with the fate of the two men and to view the case in its broader social context. Through the use of archival photos and footage, interviews with experts and historians (and even a niece of Sacco himself), clips from the 1971 movie dramatization of the story, "Sacco and Vanzetti," and voiceover recitations of excerpts from the two key figures' very own journals and letters, Miller explores how the legal system was able to veer so far off the rails in a country that prides itself on the blindness of its justice and the fair treatment it ostensibly affords to all its people. He finds his answer mainly in the love/hate relationship that America has always had with its immigrant populations. For he makes it clear that this was little more than a sham show trial, one consisting mainly of circumstantial evidence and fraudulent testimony, presided over by a judge with small tolerance for immigrants or anyone not of the Anglo-Saxon persuasion. The men were found guilty more of the sin of being "unpatriotic" than of the commission of any actual crime. It is this aspect, more than any other, that touched such a raw nerve in so many people not only in the United States but around the world. Towards the end, we are shown how the case eventually moved beyond its own limited context, entering the realm of American mythology and inspiring socially conscious artists, poets, novelists and songwriters to produce some of their most poignant and notable work.

Although the movie is a bit murky on some of the facts of the case and doesn't offer us a clear enough picture of the men as individuals (the pre-crime period in their lives is particularly sketchy), "Sacco and Vanzetti" provides us with an interesting history lesson as well as an intriguing glimpse into the time in which the events took place. In addition, with its tale of racial discrimination and societal prejudice, the movie has a great deal of relevance for the world today as we see immigration once again coming to the forefront as a hot-button political issue, a parallel the filmmakers are quick to point out at the conclusion of the film. That alone makes this a movie well worth checking out.