New film connects '20s trial, 21st century

In the age of Guantanamo, are Sacco and Vanzetti still relevant? Eighty years ago, the Italian radicals Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco were executed, having been convicted of double murder in a case that galvanized the world. They came to epitomize American intolerance in the era of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare.

"What happened to Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s is when our country did not work the way it should, when dissent was not tolerated, when immigrants were feared and were treated badly because they were immigrants," says director Peter Miller, speaking by phone from his New York home. His new documentary on the case opens Wednesday at the Museum of Fine Arts.

"Sacco and Vanzetti" argues that the events it documents are a perfect illustration of the dangers of pitting civil liberties against national security, and of the fear of militant foreign ideologies. Images of Muslims in shackles mingle with 1920 s footage of police raids on Italian radicals, illustrating the common thread of political intolerance and racial or religious prejudice.

Through a combination of archival material, interviews with experts, and dramatic readings of the accused men's words (with John Turturro as Vanzetti, and Tony Shalhoub as Sacco), Miller's documentary tells the story of their lives, their trial, and the efforts made to save their lives. If this sounds like the formula for a Ken Burns film, Miller has the credentials: He produced Burns' s "Jazz" and "Frank Lloyd Wright."

"One of the things that Ken always emphasizes in his films is that they are . . . about human stories," Miller notes. "Telling the story of a historical event, it's always important to keep it real, and to keep it human, and to keep it honest on a personal level, while at the same time recognizing that that story has broader truths to tell us about our society."

Like Burns, Miller has a deep-seated interest in salvaging neglected shreds of American history. As the film tours the sites of the Sacco and Vanzetti case -- the factory where Vanzetti worked, the murder scene -- we find that not only is there no marker of what had occurred there, but that the very places have been erased, covered over by mall parking lots and urban detritus.

"My hope with a film like this is to create something which does bring back to life what these people went through, and what the country went through at the time, and to show that behind these anonymous parking lots, a huge amount of American life and struggle have taken place," Miller says.

On April 15, 1920, paymaster Frederick Parmenter and guard Alexander Berardelli were killed outside their shoe factory in South Braintree. Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up in a sweep, and their contradictory testimony led police to believe that the two men were the murderers. What was true was that Sacco and Vanzetti were no strangers to violence -- or at least the idea of it. Both men had been followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani, whose organization had been responsible for a wave of violence that included the attempted firebombing in 1919 of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home in Washington

The Palmer Raids of 1919-1920, prompted by the Russian Revolution and events at home, sought to contain the perceived Communist menace through a crackdown on radicals of all stripes. Sacco and Vanzetti were, in the view of the film, victims of an unparalleled miscarriage of justice, prompted by a political culture intent on maintaining order at the cost of civil liberties.

Accusations of judicial misconduct and shoddy policework, discrepancies in witness testimony, and the discovery of another potential culprit all emerged during the six-year appeals process. Defense attorney Fred H. Moore, reasoning that in the heated political environment, his clients were unlikely to receive an impartial trial, chose instead to put the political system on trial, fruitlessly arguing that Sacco and Vanzetti were merely part of a governmental crackdown on Italian radicals.

"The most important thing about the Sacco-Vanzetti case today is what it says about the atmosphere of prejudice against foreigners, against radicals, in a time of war or near-war," historian Howard Zinn, who appears in the film, says by phone.

Judge Webster Thayer (accused by this newspaper's Frank Sibley, who covered the trial, in a letter after the initial verdict to the Massachusetts attorney general, of bias against Sacco and Vanzetti) denied all of the defense's motions in one fell swoop. Even a blue-ribbon panel appointed by Governor Alvan T. Fuller of Massachusetts in order to quell the rising protests, led by Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, chose to uphold the verdicts, prompting the bitter comment (quoted in the movie) that "It's not every prisoner who has the president of Harvard throw the switch for them."

In the years since the men's' executions, historians have picked through the case's voluminous evidence and reached every possible conclusion: both Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent, both were guilty, only Sacco was guilty of murder. Others see the revisionist impulse as mistaken.

"To me, the important thing is to understand that, whether guilty or innocent, with the conditions under which the trial took place they could not possibly get a fair trial," says Zinn. "It's a diversion from the most important aspect of the case to keep arguing their guilt or innocence, which is an issue which will never be completely resolved." The film chooses not to consider the possibility of their guilt.

"To the extent that we know what happened 80 years ago, it seems to me that the most recent and the best scholarship on the subject shows that everything that was used to convict these men has been cast into extraordinary doubt," says Miller. "And so, it raises a creative question for me as a filmmaker: Do I raise people's assertions that Sacco was guilty, and then shoot them down, or do I present instead what I think is actually what happened? My instinct told me that what I should do is tell a historical narrative that presents what actually happened, and in my mind what happened is they received a terribly unfair trial, and I find it very hard to believe that either man was guilty."

It is ultimately the words of historian Mary Anne Trasciatti, one of the film's voices, that resonate most: "Of course, you wonder -- are they guilty, or are they innocent? But in this justice system, as we've constructed it, the important issue is: Are they innocent until proven guilty? And in this case, clearly, they were not."