Scottsboro: An American Tragedy

Film makers Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker dig deep into the story and its ramifications, exposing how the twin evils of racism and anti-Semitism combined to foment institutional injustice, and led — if a silver lining could be found — to the triumphs of the civil-rights movement two and three decades later.

Barak Goodman and Daniel Anker have done a tremendous job of sorting the facts from a tangle of fictions, and include perspectives from a wide variety of experts and testimonies from a surprising number of surviving eyewitnesses. Together, they do the whole, horrible episode justice, something awfully hard to come by in the state of Alabama in 1931.

The filmmakers know how potent the material is, and they don't hammer away at the obvious.

A well-researched picture of how racism led to nine men being falsely accused and wrongly convicted. One only wishes that the filmmakers had more than 84 minutes in which to tell the story.

All emerge as vivid historical figures in this lucid account.

Goodman and Anker adroitly shape a cohesive drama out of a complicated history.

As fascinating as the case is as history, however, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy is a TV show, not a movie.