JohnHowardReid 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".

mark.waltz This play is a product of the depression, much like "Dead End", "The Petrified Forest" and "Tobacco Road". It is not something that could probably be revived today outside of theater companies that specialize in the most rare classics. Yet the themes resonate today: wrongful arrest, organized crime, extreme poverty and especially, mankind's incredible inhumanity. It is an adult themed film that requires attention to details, much like the same year's "Fury", and might stir up animosity towards a society that continues to psychologically slap the poor, the immigrant, and anybody deemed to be an outcast simply trying to find justice. As a child, Burgess Meredith witnessed his father (John Carradine) sentenced to death, witnessed his father quietly place a curse on the judge for killing an innocent man, and witnessed the lights go off miles away in the death chamber. The sudden discussion of the case in law schools brings Meredith to New York to find some answers, and it leads to not only a confrontation with the criminal mastermind (Eduardo Cianelli) and the aged judge (Edward Ellis) who is now a shell of himself. Meredith must decide how he will deal with what he discovers, falling for the sweet Margo, ironically the sister of a much troubled man who was in the car who opened fire on the payroll manager whom Carradine was accused of killing.With its poetic, almost Greek tragedy like set-up, "Winterset" isn't a feel good film of any nature. Residents of the slums dancing under the Brooklyn Bridge and ordered away from there by the police, a heavy downpour and segments of almost a dreamlike nature gives this a unique look. Meredith is outstanding in his film debut, and Ellis delivers a quiet, troubled performance that was deserving of Oscar recognition. This may not hold up completely today towards often long, awkward monologues, but any film that gets you thinking about social injustice of any kind can't be forgotten.

MartinHafer 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.

bmacv From RKO studios in 1936 (though it looks as though it were made in the earliest ‘30s), during the heyday of the Astaire-Rogers musicals, came something rich and strange. Maxwell Anderson's very serious poetic play was boiled down into a movie that's part Depression-era gangster flick, part Shavian social-issue drama, and part neo-Greek tragedy.The igniting fuse was the Nicola Sacco/Bartolomeo Vanzetti case of 1927, where two immigrant anarchists were condemned (some would say railroaded) to death supposedly for a robbery in which guards were killed. Anderson pushes it back to 1920 and focuses on a single man, Bartolomeo Romagna (John Carradine), whose auto, filled with anarchist/socialist tracts, is stolen for a similar crime by gangster Eduardo Cianelli. When condemned, Carradine eloquently rebukes the judge (Edward Ellis).The film now flashes forward to 1936, when Romagna's down-and-out drifter son (Burgess Merdith), spurred by revisionist theories of the case, journeys to New York to confront the surviving principals, including Cianelli, Ellis and a reluctant witness (Paul Guildfoyle). All converge for a reckoning preordained by The Fates....Anderson has heightened his dialogue to lend it immortal aspirations (which may have been a grandiose miscalculation – the dominant rhetorical mode of the twentieth century, obvious even by 1936, is flatting). The high-flown posture extends to the look of the film, too – a stylized nightscape that's a harbinger of the look of film noir to come a few years later. A low-ceilinged tenement-basement flat is oppressively claustrophobic (markedly so, given the number of actors crammed into it), while the cobblestones and stone arches of the low-rent streets near New York's waterfront glisten wickedly in the pelting rain. (At times the slums look like the central squares of those Transylvanian villages so common in Universal horror pix of this era).Almost every element of Winterset should seem laughable now – but doesn't (though there are a few close shaves). There's an early sequence involving a hurdy-gurdy that lures the slum-dwelling underclass out of its burrows to dance that's hauntingly powerful – as is the face of Winterset's love interest, an actress known as Margo, that harks back to the expressiveness of the silents.