Bertrand Tavernier's admittedly sober and thoughtful Le Juge et l'assassin (The Judge and the Assassin, 1976) was in many respects an even more dispiriting response to the years of radical exhaustion that followed the brief exhilaration of May '68 and the cul-de-sac of extraparliamentary violence. Tavernier's fictionalized rumination on the last days of Joseph Vachet (called Bouvier in the film), a French mass murderer and rapist who preyed on women during the 1890s, has been hailed by Jill Forbes as an example of radical filmmaking--"a critique of the French penal and judicial systems which raised questions about the definitions of madness and sanity by suggesting that these are as much social as clinical." Whatever the `transgressive' implications of Tavernier's amalgam of historical recreation and tasteful gore-fest, it is nevertheless more than a little alarming to listen to Bouvier's constant reiteration of his "anarchist" sentiments. Tavernier's most shameless addition of insult to injury is probably a sequence in which Bouvier mutters some lyrics written by Jules Valles, the anarchist novelist and hero of the Paris Commune, who continued to influence radicals during the events of May '68. Valles's expansive vision of a decentralized "free association of citizens" is rendered unrecognizable in a film which equates hammy lunacy with the spirit of anarchism. This quasiaffirmation of an amoral hero is, in the final analysis, more chic than insightful: another French intellectual's infatuation with "anarchistic" criminality and the glamor of pathology.

As urban political violence became a hazy memory, filmmakers mined the past to whimsically commemorate the heyday of propaganda by the deed. Dusan Makavejev's Manifesto (1988) is a case in point -- a wan evocation of a Central European anarchist's zany flirtation with anarchist violence. Makavejev's early films tried to define an anti-Stalinist politics which was, at least by default, anarchist in spirit. Unlike the anti-Stalinist avant-gardism of WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) and Sweet Movie (1974), Manifesto's political perspective is utterly conventional. The bomb-throwing hero, portrayed without conviction by Eric Stoltz, spends most of his time flailing around in bed with nubile women while uttering inanities like "those who eat cake while others starve deserve to be blown up."

If Griffith and Porter laid the groundwork for the stereotypes of fanatical anarchists who never left home without a detonator, Hal Hartley's Simple Men (1992) could be considered the postmodern apotheosis of these outmoded cliches. Hartley's film, with its trademark clipped dialog and intricately plotted coincidences, is both an absurdist thriller and an equally ironized Oedipal drama--a road movie in which two brothers from the McCabe family finally locate their errant father, an aging radical who supposedly enjoyed a career as a mad bomber during the Sixties. The awkward reconciliation climaxes with the palpably dotty father reading a lengthy passage from Malatesta's Anarchy to his assembled sons and admiring girlfriend. Writing in Freedom, the London anarchist fortnightly whose press published the edition of Anarchy visible in Hartley's film, Colin Ward observed that the youthful contingent repeat Malatesta's words "phrase by phrase, like children of the cultural revolution in China learning the thoughts of Chairman Mao." Taking Malatesta's words out of context, the passage from Anarchy intoned by the fanatical McCabe--with its promotion of "intransigence" and revolutionary "selflessness"-makes the Italian's eloquent manifesto seem like a shrill screed. Hartley, however, fails to quote Malatesta's advocacy of "the sentiment of solidarity" and the "community of comradeship." For even an ostensibly hip director like Hartley, anarchists are robotic and, above all, fanatically violent doomsayers.

The attempts of anarchists and their sympathizers to rectify negative stereotypes often resulted, despite the best intentions, in positive, but overly sentimental, portraits of heroes and martyrs such as Sacco and Vanzetti and Joe Hill. Oddly enough, the cinematic rehabilitation of anarchists which reached its crescendo in the 1970s was prefigured by David Lean's lush epic, Doctor Zhivago. In Lean's 1965 adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel, screenwriter Robert Bolt in fact expands on the novel's sympathetic portrait of Kostoied-Amursky, described by Pasternak as "a gray-haired revolutionary co-operativist, who had been in all the forced-labor camps of the old regime and was now discovering those of the new." "Co-operativism" is a synonym for Kropotkin's brand of anarchocommunism, and the Bolt-Lean version of Zhivago's encounter with the unrepentant anarchist (Klaus Kinski) on a congested train as they both depart Moscow for the Urals makes it clear that the filmmakers are determined to treat radical "co-operativism" with gingerly detachment. Pasternak's only vaguely defined character (who nevertheless clearly elicits Zhivago's empathy) is treated ambiguously in the opulent film version. His unkempt, wild-haired presence is in sharp contrast to Omar Sharif's matinee idol demeanor as Zhivago. The truculent cooperativist's reply to a poker-faced Bolshevik who declares "I want no anarchy" is in the form of a defiant declaration: "Long live Anarchy!--I am the only free man on this train, the rest of you are cattle." This sentiment is not explicitly mocked by Lean, but the character's eccentric appearance and spontaneous outburst makes this relic of the Russian past as comically earnest as he is patently honest.

As the New Left's energy started to wane, two films, Bo Widerberg's Joe Hill (1971) and Giuliano Montaldo's Sacco and Vanzeni (1971), looked backward to a transitional historical period before the final polarization of Bolshevism and anarchism. Both films, perhaps not coincidentally, paid reverential tribute to antiauthoritarian martyrs who were also celebrated by the Old Left and the Popular Front.

Joe Hill tackled the life of perhaps the most cryptic figure in the history of American radicalism. Accused by the Utah authorities of robbing and murdering a grocer, liberals, socialists, and anarchists have long been preoccupied with confirming the state's complicity in a massive frame-up that has turned the unassuming Swedish immigrant into a hallowed American leftist. While it is even difficult to determine whether Hill, the famed "labor martyr," considered himself an anarchist, Widerberg, whose work redefines the notion of a "lyrical left," prefers Hill, the "guerrilla minstrel" with a knack for ingenious ditties who might be considered a Swedish precursor of Woody Guthrie or Pete Seeger, to Hill the insurrectionist. Joe Hill ignores its hero's fondness for industrial sabotage, preferring to focus on his composition of such beloved ballads as "The Preacher and the Slave" and "The Rebel Girl." Hill's death in 1915, on the cusp of the radical movement's utter transformation, paved the way for his enshrinement as a folk poet whose sentiments were congenial to Communists and liberal trade unionists, as well as anarchists. As Robert Cantwell notes with subtle astringency, "When the culture of the Wobbly met the ideological left in the thirties, it discovered a kind of resurrection of itself in the...austere personal discipline of Leninism, as well as in the...projects and worker legions of the New Deal." The odd conversion of Joe Hill into a Popular Front hero can probably be attributed to the fact that his brand of IWW militancy, although implicitly anarchistic, was vague enough to encourage hagiographers to mold him into a peculiar hybrid of Paul Bunyan and Earl Browder. Remaining true to this muddled ideological heritage, Joe Hill features Joan Baez singing Earl Robinson and Alfred Hayes's Popular Front anthem, "The Ballad of Joe Hill." The Industrial Workers of the World--the organization with which he was linked during the best-documented phase of his career as a trade unionist--has been alternately considered anarcho-syndicalist, an almost unprecedented amalgam of Marxism and anarchism, and, most commonly, if simplistically, a distinctively American variety of frontier leftism that could not conceivably be compared to European traditions of syndicalism or Marxism.

Sequences which highlight shots of hobos making their escape from cramped train cars and an extended analysis of the "tricks of the employing class" by a Wobbly named Blackie are truer to the spirit of turn-of-the-century radicalism than a film like Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha (1972). (In time-honored B-movie fashion, the IWW milieu is only the pretext for Scorsese's Cormanesque emphasis on sex and crime.) But, despite Widerberg's attentiveness to the romance of the rails, his film gives few indications that he is aware of the extent of Hill's anarchist affinities. For example, the virtual certainty that Hill supported Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon's efforts to topple the regime of Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz is not even broached. Less well-known than Emiliano Zapata's peasant radicalism, the thinly veiled anarchism of the brothers' Junta Organizadora del Partido Liberal Mexicano is considered by many scholars a model for Zapata's eventual emphasis on "Land and Liberty."

To an even greater extent than the Hill affair, the Sacco and Vanzetti case became a cause celebre that inspired feuding leftists to join forces. Montaldo's film cannot ignore its protagonists' anarchism, but a tendency to veer from political thriller to lukewarm humanist uplift (Joan Baez again sings the theme song, "The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti") gives little indication of Sacco and Vanzetti's anarcho-communist fervor. Sacco and Vanzetti is essentially a simplified version of Herbert Ehrmann's meticulously documented argument that the robbery and murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Massachusetts, which the prosecution pinned on the Italian anarchists, was actually the work of a network of criminals known as the Morelli gang. Grappling, rather ineptly, with the class tensions peculiar to Boston that pitted a vindictive, Harvard educated prosecutor, Frederick Katzmann, against impoverished Italian immigrants, Montaldo avoids the nuances of Sacco and Vanzetti's anarchism.

Sacco and Vanzetti suffers from an ill-conceived effort to find parallels between the frenzied antiradicalism which plagued America in the Twenties and analogous examples of contemporary Italian malfeasance. For example, there is a clear rhetorical inspiration for Montaldo's decision to detail the death of Sacco and Vanzetti's comrade, Andrea Salsedo, in an early sequence. The death of Salsedo, an advocate of anarchist direct action whose detention by the police can only be understood within the context of the government's vendetta against immigrant radicalism, was reported as a suicide despite the fact that anarchists viewed the official story with skepticism. While there is apparently little doubt that Salsedo actually killed himself, Montaldo is undoubtedly trying to link Salsedo's death with the genuinely murky "suicide" of Giuseppe Pinelli, a militant Italian anarchist whose death in 1969, as Peter Bondanella points out, "inspired Dario Fo's play Accidental Death of an Anarchist."

Sacco and Vanzetti's earnest attempt to emulate the thrillers of Francesco Rosi and Costa-Gavras sometimes backfires, but Montaldo does his best to place his heroes within a precise historical framework. An opening montage outlining the virulence of the anti-Red Palmer raids (named after the notoriously reactionary Attorney General) elucidates the tendency, still vibrant in the Twenties, to lump anarchists, socialists, and Communists into a monolithic subversive threat. But just as Palmer himself could not distinguish between ideological factions, the film sidesteps Sacco and Vanzetti's specific anarchist beliefs (their indebtededness to the work of Luigi Galleani is delineated by Paul Avrich in a ground-breaking study) for the narrative pyrotechnics of courtroom drama. Sacco and Vanzetti emerge as near-angelic anarchist lambs reluctantly led to the slaughter. In perhaps the film's pivotal sequence, Katzmann, directly confronting Sacco and Vanzetti, fumes that they "can never understand American ideals" because they "can't even speak our language." Katzmann's tirade prompts Sacco to reiterate his faith in anarchism and Vanzetti to testify that he "wants to live, but in a better world." The film captures Vanzetti's slightly platitudinous altruism, but fails to capture his (and Sacco's) ardent belief in propaganda by the deed.