Cinema Salon: Don Stewart Presents Sacco and Vanzetti at the VIFF Centre (directed by Giuliano Montaldo)

[This article may get expanded if I hear back from Don!]

Attention cinephiles, anarchists, and used bookstore enthusiasts: here's a genuinely exciting chance to see a movie that seldom screens, about an important moment in history, introduced by a man who himself is pretty interesting: Don Stewart, proprietor of MacLeod's Books, Vancouver's best, biggest, and I believe longest-surviving antiquarian bookstore, still located at the corner of Richards and Pender. Had no idea the event was happening until yesterday and suddenly went into high alert, because - well, I don't know about the rest of you, but this is a movie I've wanted to see for years...

Y'see, this Tuesday, as part of Cinema Salon, Don is presenting a screening of the 1971 Italian film Sacco and Vanzetti. (link leads to the VIFF Centre listing).  I have not confirmed my suspicions yet, but - since I gather Don has a bit of a political past - I doubt very much that he is screening this film because of a fondness for filmmaker Giuliano Montaldo. I *am* interested in the topic of the film myself, about the persecution/ prosecution/ execution of two Italian immigrant anarchists wrongly convicted of murder in 1920's Massachusetts, and even more interested in what Don has to say about it - because I have something like 40 years of history with Don, dating back to the time when, around age 15 or so, I found a B. Traven first edition in a thrift store and consulted the yellow pages to find someone to sell it to, ultimately flipping the book to Don for a hefty profit. But in fact, Montaldo would be the key reason that I am going - because immediately prior to making Sacco and Vanzetti, as part of a bid to secure funding to make the movies he wanted to make, Montaldo made one very entertaining, slightly nasty commercial action movie, Machine Gun McCain, the casting of which appears to have been basically taken over by John Cassavetes and his rep company (Cassavetes, Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, and Val Avery are all in it, as well as a few notable non-Cassavetes-people, like Britt Ekland and Gabriele Ferzetti, whom you might recall from Once Upon a Time in the West). Cassavetes himself took the role to secure funding to make his own films - in his case, Husbands. So Sacco and Vanzetti and Husbands - as radically different as I presume they are - have a sort of parallel history, here, both films funded by Hank McCain robbing the Mafia in Las Vegas (a peculiar metaphor for raising money for non-commercial film projects, but hey, why not?). 

By the way, if you care about any of this but haven't heard Mike Patton singing "The Ballad of Hank McCain" on the expanded CD of John Zorn's The Big Gundown, it is superb... and streamable online here. 

While many of his films are hard to see in North America, Giuliano Montaldo also made, much later, one very interesting, underrated political thriller starring a young Nic Cage, about an Italian soldier stationed in (I think) Ethiopia who has sex with (or perhaps rapes...?) a woman, and then discovers - possible spoiler alert? - that she had leprosy; it was called - at least for purposes of distribution here - Time to Kill, and held my attention and respect for awhile back in the days of VHS. As I recall, it wasn't well-received by critics of the day, who were wanting an entertainment, and got instead a gritty, even somewhat ugly arthouse film that is none too kind to its young star. Since there is to my knowledge only a cropped, crap-looking DVD of it, I have not revisited it in years, but would, if it came out in blu-ray; as I recall, it does interesting things with time, with key events in the film's narrative being withheld til its end, so you don't really understand what anything means until the last few minutes of the movie; I would be unsurprised if it had an influence on the filmmaking of, for instance, Quentin Tarantino or such (there is no doubt a finite and documentable history to non-sequential cinema, dating back even further to Kubrick's The Killing, obviously, but Time to Kill was the first film that played with its time structure that *I* saw, so perhaps that is true for others, as well...

Anyhow, with Montaldo having helmed two films that held my attention - including one - the Cassavetes - that I am very fond of indeed, I am very excited about the screening of Sacco and Vanzetti - a film I have wanted to see for years. I do not know if I will hear back from Mr. Stewart, who is probably busy running a bookstore today, and who may not want to ruin the surprise of what he has to say tomorrow by answering my questions here, so this may be all I write about this particular screening, but I congratulate Cinema Salon for this most-inspired film choice. With apologies to Adrian Mack (who did a stellar job presenting the Clash's Rude Boy a few years ago), tomorrow's screening is the Cinema Salon that I am most excited about since Michael Ondaatje presented The Hustler (where I first learned of The Queen's Gambit, then in no way famous; that particular Tevis novel is, I believe he told us, Ondaatje's favourite book, which - I paraphrase - he re-reads every few years just for the pleasure of its prose). I mean, I love Mack, I'm just only ever been so-so on Rude Boy.

Read more about Tuesday's screening of Sacco and Vanzetti on the VIFF Centre website.