Giuliano Montaldo, Italian Director of ‘Sacco and Vanzetti,’ Dies at 93
06.09.2023 - 14:11
/ variety.com
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Giuliano Montaldo, the prolific Italian director, actor and film industry executive, whose works comprise powerful political drama “Sacco and Vanzetti” about the Massachusetts trial and execution in 1927 of accused Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, has died at his home in Rome. He was 93.
His death was announced Wednesday by his family and reported by multiple Italian media outlets. No cause of death was revealed.
Born in 1930 in Genoa, Montaldo was still a Turin university student when, in 1950, director Carlo Lizzani gave him a role in the film “Achtung Banditi!.” Montaldo then moved to Rome in 1954, where he worked as a journalist for Italian newspaper Il Tempo and after a few years decided to pursue a filmmaking career. Montaldo cut his teeth as a director working as an assistant to Lizzani and then to Gillo Pontecorvo, Sergio Leone, and Francesco Rosi, learning the ropes from some of the masters of Italian cinema.
In 1960 he made his directorial debut with “Tiro al piccione,” a drama about the partisan Resistance that launched in competition from the 1961 Venice Film Festival. With his second feature “The Reckless” (“Una Bella Grinta”) about a social climber in Italy during the postwar economic miracle, he won the special jury prize at the Berlin Film Festival in 1965.
That year Montaldo directed the second unit of Pontecorvo’s masterpiece “The Battle Of Algiers.” “Sacco and Vanzetti,” which went to Cannes in 1971, stars the late Gian Maria Volonté as Vanzetti, while Sacco was played by Riccardo Cucciolla, who won the best actor award at Cannes for this role. The film’s musical score was composed and conducted by Ennio Morricone, plus there is a
.