In the shadow of the electric chair
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | In the shadow of the electric chair |
| Country of production | Austria |
| original language | German |
| Publishing year | 1927 |
| length | 82 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director |
Alfred Kempf artist. Advisory board: André de Rodrigué |
| script | according to documents from the American trial |
| production | EM goose for goose film, Vienna |
| occupation | |
| |
In the shadow of the electric chair is an Austrian film from 1927 about the murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti .
action
The Italian immigrant Nicola Sacco, a worker in a shoe factory in Bridgewater, USA, is close friends with his compatriot Bartolomeo Vanzetti. This fisherman lives with an old Russian woman and her daughter Sonja. One day in April 1920, a cashier who and a colleague had picked up a box of wage money from a bank was attacked and robbed. The $ 16,000 is stolen and both men are killed. The gangsters escape with the loot in a waiting vehicle. After the police did not find a hot lead despite an intensive search for the perpetrators, they received the order "from above" to look for the two wage robbers in relevant anarchist circles.
A police detective, disguised as a worker, approaches Sonja in the hope of obtaining information. Sonja quickly gained confidence in the police inspector and falls in love with him. In this way, the man first hears about the two Italian immigrants, who are also said to have anarchist tendencies. In the garage of a certain Boda, the undercover police officer soon discovers the robbers' escape vehicle. The first police measure taken is the arrest of two Italian anarchists who publish a newspaper. Vanzetti works there as an employee. When he and Sacco try to get rid of compromising material from the editorial team, the police observe and pursue them during this process. Finally they hide the documents in the former escape vehicle. Sacco and Vanzetti are now considered the main suspects.
Both men are immediately arrested and brought to justice. After only six weeks of the trial, the court has no doubt about her guilt. Although there are plenty of witnesses who provide them with alibis, the two men are sentenced to death. Sacco and Vanzetti have been behind bars for a full seven years, and applications for retrial have been thrown out seven times. Finally, the date for the execution was set for July 10, 1927, then postponed to August 10. Numerous appeals for clemency as well as the pledges of innocence by the convicts fail to have their effect - Governor Fuller firmly adheres to the death sentence. But then one day a certain Medeiros is arrested for another murder. The man swears that Sacco and Vanzetti are completely innocent of the bloody act they are accused of. And again the execution date is postponed ...
Production notes and further filming of the case
In the shadow of the electric chair was a direct response to the sensational trial of two Italian immigrants in the United States. Immediately after the verdict of April 7, 1927, in which the death penalty was imposed, the film was planned as Sacco and Vanzetti . The shooting time fell at a crucial stage during the final fixing of the execution date.
The seven-act film is considered to be the first production to deal with the events and opened on October 7, 1927 in Vienna. At this point, Sacco and Vanzetti had already been dead for six and a half weeks. In Germany, the film was shown under the title Am Tode Past .
More than four decades later, the Italian-French co-production directed by Giuliano Montaldo under the original title Sacco e Vanzetti, an internationally successful film adaptation of the case, was released in the cinemas in 1971 . In it, Gian Maria Volonté and Riccardo Cucciolla played the two accused.
Contemporary review
“ The Sacco and Vanzetti affair, which stirred up so much dust all over the world, is here, brilliantly staged, with its prehistory and all the details, reproduced in such a captivating, humanly approaching form that one grips the course of the plot from scene to scene follows that unfolds before the eyes of the beholder, like an unstoppable fate. "