Awesome Movie

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

What we have to ask ourselves is what are the chances that a judge who sent an innocent man to the chair some sixteen years previously and has taken to wandering Lear-like the streets of the city in inclement weather, will fetch up in the hovel-like home of the one witness who, had he been called to the stand could have proved the innocence of the condemned man, at the same time as the son of the condemned man, now a drifter, who has arrived, purely by chance from the other side of the country or 3,000 miles whichever is the greater, and, for good measure, the actual real killer. This is beyond contrivance and is not helped by the poetic dialogue playwright Maxwell Anderson puts into the mouths of his characters, particularly that of the son. Anderson clearly based his play - adapted by himself for the screen - on the execution in 1927 of Sacco and Vanzetti widely believed to be innocent of and crime. In an effort to distance his story from the real case Anderson moved the time back to 1930 and dispensed with one of the two falsely accused but while the case was still generating ink in the US decades later it had little impact in the UK. Anderson meant well and had a penchant for lofty themes but seen in 2015 it seems both stilted and dated.

Going in, I had no idea that this film had it's inspiration in the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial of 1927. Now that I do, I don't find that it makes much difference. I have some real problems with this picture, not the least of which is the way it brings the characters together. Case in point - the judge from the original murder trial of 1920 shows up as an amnesiac wanderer in a New York City slum, doesn't remember his own name, and then comes around to recall the events of a case for which he carries sixteen years of regret for not really knowing the truth of it. His crusade brings him to the exact location where a mobster (Eduardo Ciannelli), a witness to the original crime (Paul Guilfoyle) and the son of the convicted man sixteen years earlier (Burgess Meredith) all converge to set up a final climactic showdown in the battle of good versus evil. Now think about that - what are the odds? Overlooking these highly improbable aspects of the picture, I can see why some other reviewers on this board give it higher marks than mine. The characters are portrayed with earnest sentiment, and the overriding sense that justice must win in the end propels the picture forward. But I just couldn't escape the idea that gangster Estrella (Ciannelli) would have been left unscathed if he had just left things alone. He didn't seem to have anything to do with the trial that opened the picture, (he wasn't even there), and there was nothing in the story to implicate him or his associates in the payroll robbery crime. Yes, we saw him do it, but it seems no one else in the story did.You know, I like Burgess Meredith, and it was really cool to see him in a film he made forty years before becoming Sylvester Stallone's trainer in the Rocky movies. It gives you an idea how far he came as an actor from this, his first credited big screen role, and in the lead no less. He's surrounded by a handful of competent supporting players as well, notably the single named Margo as his love interest Miriamne, and Guilfoyle as the conflicted brother Esdras. But overall, I think the best performance here was John Carradine in his damning declaration of innocence to open the picture, a brief but moving encounter before the judge who would eventually lose his way. My compliments as well to director Alfred Santell for the effective use of those magnificent stone arches and alley ways, lent a particular sinister ambiance by the night time elements. Also for the clever way bad guy Estrella was brought to justice without ever getting to the bottom of the original case.

I like this film. It is an interesting retelling of a point of view regarding one of America's most controversial trials - the 1921 - 1927 legal ordeal of Nicolo Sacco and Bartholomeo Vanzetti for the murder of two men in a payroll robbery in Massachusetts. Both were Italian anarchist immigrants in the U.S. Both were convicted by juries which were local Yankee in make-up, not having any non-Yankees on them. Certainly no Italian Americans. The judge, Webster Thayer, was an openly bigoted man. But thousands of people around the country and the world attacked the verdict, and demanded a retrial. Among those who attacked the trial was George Bernard Shaw, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Fiorello La Guardia, and (in a move that opened his later great judicial career) Felix Frankfurter. After going through appeals, and the revelations of a fellow prisoner that the payroll robbery was committed by a local criminal gang, the matter was left to a small commission headed by President Lowell of Harvard College. It turned out to be a whitewash. In the end, the two men were electrocuted. Thayer's and Lowell's reputations never recovered from this.Scholars on the case are still divided on the guilt or innocence of the two defendants - some have suggested they were both railroaded, or that Sacco was more likely to be guilty, but Vanzetti was probably innocent. Today, nearly eighty years after their deaths they still remain a flash point regarding American bigotry. In 1977, on the 50th Anniversary of their deaths, Governor Michael Dukakis formally pardoned both men.Maxwell Anderson wrote about the subject twice: the play WINTERSET and the play HIGH TOR. Anderson's reputation as a dramatist has been inflated over the years by critics like Brooks Atkinson. He could occasionally write a well done play, but he was not on the level of his contemporary Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill's tragedies (especially his final ones) was based on personal demons from his family and his life. O'Neill was also willing to experiment on stage with masks (THE GREAT GOD BROWN) or with internal counter-dialogs (STRANGE INTERLUDE) or even with trilogies based on Greek originals (MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA). Anderson only experimented one way - he tried blank verse plays (ELIZABETH THE QUEEN, MARY OF Scotland), and did not do it too well. But here he obviously was passionately determined to defend the memory of the two Italian - American anarchists. His plot is based on developing the thread of the confession (mentioned above) that the murders were planned by a local criminal gang. The gang's leader is Eduardo Cianelli, a brutal criminal who framed the two men by stealing their car as the getaway car.But the strength of the confession is furthered by claiming the judge was bribed (Thayer was biased but not bribed). Edward Ellis (best recalled as the missing inventor in THE THIN MAN) is the corrupt jurist, who is now a wandering derelict. Vanzetti's famous final letter from the death cell (an elegant final comment that is the basis of contention between Henry Fonda and Eugene Palette in THE MALE ANIMAL) is the basis for the elegant denunciation of the judge in the court by John Carridine (note that his character's first name is also Bartholomeo). Ironically, today, it is believed that elegant final message of Vanzetti may have been written in part by a reporter who supported the defendants.The son and daughter of the dead men (Burgess Meredith and Margo) are seeking to prove their innocence. But they run against the determination of Cianelli, and his goons. The film is fascinating enough, and concludes satisfactorily (much more than the actual case did). The plot's conclusion also leads to a more prosaic point - if you plan to use a signal to destroy someone, don't forget that signal and use it yourself. See the film to understand that last point.

Maxwell Anderson's Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play was brought to the screen by RKO in 1936 with the original cast members, and Anderson himself adapting the Screen-Play.........The results were a hard-hitting expose' of injustice in the Judicial system of the 1920s........Based loosely on the Sacco-Vancetti trial of the 1920s, Anderson wrote a powerful adaptation of his Stage hit...........Burgess Meredith, along with Eduardo Ciannelli reprised their Stage roles as Mio, and Troc Estrella respectively in their first screen appearences......Both would go on to do scores of films and stage work for decades to come after Critic's raved about their work in "Winterset"......Set under the Brooklyn Bridge for most of the film, the characters involved in the injustice, assemble seeking the truth & to avoid it becoming public knowledge.........Ciannelli's "Troc Estrella" is one of the screens most dastardly bad guys of all time......and Stanley Ridges is a standout as "Shadow' his henchman...............The Musical score by Nathaniel Shilkret & Max Steiner(un-credited) was nominated for an Oscar.......It was so compelling in this Dark-Drama, that Orson Welles used portions of it in his film "Journey Into Fear'-1942....also released by RKO.......If you are a fan of fine Dramatic Acting, superb musical scoring, and very early film noir(1936)....you should see "Winterset.......Tense, Poetic, and spell-binding....It is available on Video and DVD at Amazon.com, for a very low price.......Respectively submitted, sasheegm at the movies