Every Italian goes through a Sacco and Vanzetti period. Ok, maybe not every Italian—first, you have to learn about the men, and many people don’t, even though their case created an international sensation. That’s Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, one a shoemaker, the other a fishmonger, both Italian immigrants in the early 1920s who were accused of murder and subsequently electrocuted. They were generally considered to be falsely accused, and their treatment by the legal system hardly showed that institution at its finest hour.
You learn much of this and more in a new documentary by filmmaker Peter Miller, who screened his film Sacco and Vanzetti recently to a full-house audience of over 110 in Nesbitt Hall’s Ruth Auditorium. Dean Donna Murasko welcomed the audience, including the Council General of Italy, introduced Mr. Miller, and gave a special nod to Drexel’s Nunzio Pernicone (History and Politics). A specialist in Italian American history, Professor Pernicone was a project advisor to the film, and shared screen time with other experts on the Sacco and Vanzetti case.
After the film, which received more than polite applause, Miller and Pernicone took questions from the audience who were curious about some of the technical aspects of making the film but more interested in hearing about Sacco and Vanzetti and the socio-political climate of the United States in the 1920s that resulted in the "travesty of justice" that ushered Sacco and Vanzetti to the electric chair. These issues were addressed at length by Professor Pernicone and, to a lesser extent, by Mr. Miller.
The film and the following audience-inspired elaborations by Pernicone and Miller made clear that Sacco and Vanzetti, with their literary leanings (see "On the Literary Sensibility of Nicolo Sacco"), were unusual individuals who were treated shabbily by the legal system of the time and, in fact, by history, going by their absence in high school curricula, despite the dozens of books written on the subject.
Part of Peter Miller’s drive to make his film was to create an easily accessible account of one of the most important stories—legal and historic—in America and which could be viewed by young people and adults alike who would not otherwise know about Sacco and Vanzetti.
For further reading about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, be sure to check out Albert DiBartolomeo's essay "On the Literary Sensibility of Nicolo Sacco," originally published in Italian Americana.
For more information about the documentary, visit the film's website.