Winterset (1936)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

good back-story, and good acting

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Even the master dramatist himself was delighted with this screen transformation, despite the fact that the screen writer cut a lot of his blank verse dialogue and introduced an entirely new ending. I too thought that the new ending was absolutely brilliant, the stratagem the hero uses to get out of an impossible situation being not only simple, not only realistic but highly effective as pure drama. The ironic twist with which the villain is cornered caps a superlatively constructed and cleverly thought-out narrative. I waited years to see Winterset. It did not disappoint. A great script, enthralling performances and superb production values make this film an absolute must. It's hard to believe that some of these players are making their movie debuts. Yet Burgess Meredith and Paul Guilfoyle never surpassed their acting here. In fact Guilfoyle never equalled his role here. Neither did Margo. Nor Alec Craig. Nor even Ciannelli (though he did come close a couple of times). It's also hard to believe the movie was directed by Alfred Santell. Here he abandons his usual plodding and humdrum style to use Ferguson's vast and imaginatively depressing sets with flair and authority. He punches the drama home with forceful camera angles, sharp cutting, and a remarkably skillful use of props and effects. Although it brilliantly makes use of theatrical effects, this is a movie, not a photographed stage play. Peverell Marley's atmospheric photography also reinforces the inner and outward tensions, the unnerving urgency of "Winterset".

The chance to see Broadway players recreate their performances on film back in the day should never be missed. Burgess Meredith, Margo, and Eduardo Ciannelli recreate their stage roles from Winterset in this 1936 film. But the story itself is horribly dated, mostly with a lot of left wing rhetoric which gets in the way of the plot.Probably back in 1936 no one cared as the cause of Sacco&Vanzetti was still fresh in everyone's mind. Today it is still debated by historians and legal scholars and the two working class Italian-Americans are still venerated in Italian-American households of a more liberal persuasion in their politics. But the average American today knows the case vaguely if at all today.The men went to the electric chair in Massachusetts protesting their innocence as does John Carradine in this film. Before Carradine dies he imparts a sense of mission to his son who grows up to be Burgess Meredith to find the real guilty parties.A review of the case by a law school class saying that the state electrocuted the wrong man brings new attention to the case, not something that Eduardo Ciannelli likes. He was the real trigger man in the case and now he's a big shot gangster.Rather improbable events bring Meredith, Ciannelli, the judge Edward Ellis now a drunken derelict, Paul Guilfoyle another accomplice, Guilfoyle's father Maurice Moscovitch and his sister Margo all together on a rainy and stormy night.Maxwell Anderson wrote the original play and I have to contrast it with another of his plays that made it to the screen, Key Largo. It was another film where various folks are trapped in a storm and interesting things happen. Winterset never really sheds its stage origins and can't shake the rhetoric. Contrast that to Key Largo which never loses your interest for a second and while most of the action takes place in a closed down out of season hotel where the cast is holed up you never get any sense of staginess in it. The rhetoric is there, but it never gets in the way of the story as in Winterset.Even with Oscar nominations for Art Direction and Musical scoring Winterset is a relic of bygone days.

Uggh! This was an absolutely terrible film and I can easily understand why it was allowed to sink into the public domain. The problem is not so much the leftist slant of the film, but that ALL of the dialog comes off as incredibly stagy and fake. Not one minute did I feel that the characters were real or that this was supposed to be real life--and it felt like an overly 'deep' play that was brought to the screen without any concern for how watchable the final product would be."Winterset" is a story that is a thinly veiled retelling of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial of the early 20th century. While there was an apparent rush to judgment to convict and execute the two anarchists of murder, there is evidence today that would suggest that at least Sacco was guilty. Decades after the executions of the pair, Hollywood leftists took the case under their wings--and even today it's a famous case for its miscarriage of justice. This film is an after the fact retelling of the case. While the case is interesting in many ways, however, the film is absolutely dreadful because it is so earnest and self-important. In other words, the story seems so superior and unreal in the way it was told--and the characters all come off as one-dimensional and fake. While leftists (like the leading man, Burgess Meredith) must have been filled with a sense of self-importance while making the film, they never seemed to bother to look at the story to see if it seemed real in any way. Had they done this, they would have clearly re-written the film and made the characters more realistic and the dialog at least halfway convincing. Instead, it just seemed like a very long and drawn out preachy polemic--the sort of film the public would ignore and the film makers adore. The bottom line is that this divisive and confusing case deserves a better treatment than this film--which looks more like a propaganda film than anything else. Fake, fake and fake from start to finish, as NO ONE talks the way these characters did.

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.