| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Vendetta. Prod. by Tony Mark and Sue Jett. Dir. by Nicholas Meyer. HBO, 1999. 112 mins.

On March 14, 1891, a mob of twenty thousand people stormed the city jail in New Orleans, Louisiana, and lynched eleven Sicilian immigrants. Ironically, the actions of the mob were widely regarded as a heroic defense of law and order. The truth, however, was much more insidious. 1

Based upon the 1977 book of the same name by Richard Gambino, Vendetta is a compelling portrait of prejudice. Sicilians were recruited by Louisiana planters during the late nineteenth century as a substitute labor force for African Americans. Yet within only a few short years, immigrant entrepreneurs assumed economic control of the New Orleans docks. Economic rivalry between the Sicilians and the local business establishment created bitter ethnic tension. Although the screenwriter, Timothy Prager, includes these crucial developments in the story line, he occasionally struggles with the explanatory dialogue, as when the Sicilian businessman Joseph Macheca melodramatically exclaims, "They brought us here to be the servants. In less than a generation we threaten to be their masters." . . .

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