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".

WINTERSET was a big hit on Broadway and RKO's decision to retain Burgess Meredith, Margo, and Eduardo Ciannelli to repeat their original stage roles is a major reason for the success of the film version. That they were able to adapt their performances to the intimacy of the camera is remarkable. Maxwell Anderson's dialogue is naturalized considerably from its poetic original but enough of the beautiful lyricism is retained in Anthony Veiler's screenplay to make it a very special script. While Ted Hecht must have been very good on Broadway as Garth, Paul Guilfoyle's performance in the film resulted in perhaps his best and most important screen work. Two other performances deserve special mention. Stanley Ridges as Shadow is menacing without being paranoid as is his boss, played by Ciannelli. Ridges' bloody appearance in the Esdras doorway is one of the most shocking screen moments in 30's cinema. And Willard Robertson, who made a career out of playing impatient meanies is beautifully obstinate as the boorish patrolman. Russian actor Maurice Moscovitch makes his screen debut as Garth and Miriamme's father. A veteran of the Yiddish Theater, Moscovitch later played Paulette Goddard's father in THE GREAT DICTATOR but died before that picture's release. Another Russian, Mischa Auer, makes one of his rare dramatic appearances as a social radical.The physical set is beautiful, especially the stone-style recreation of the alley and stairwells beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Finally, the film boasts a rare original score by Nathaniel Shilkret. Shilkret was a longtime bandleader who made records for RCA. He was hired as part of the RKO music staff in 1936 to replace Max Steiner who was leaving to join fledgling org Selznick-International. Shilkret's bold compositions for WINTERSET enhance the theatricality of film, though most of the dupe prints extant on video reproduce the soundtrack with very limited fidelity.For modern audiences with little patience for plays-made-into-films that represent their stage origins, WINTERSET will be a disappointment. But for those who can appreciate the care with which director Alfred Santell took to recreate much of the prosaic beauty of the Broadway original, WINTERSET will be a rewarding experience - if you can see it in a respectable copy.

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.

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.