Word: vanzetti
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Winterset-Maxwell Anderson's opus about Sacco, Vanzetti, love and death. A good production of a fairly uninspiring show. At the Loeb Theater, 64 Brattle St., Friday at 8, Saturday...
...years after its premiere. In its relentlessly hammering sweep of great social themes, the powerful story of a star-crossed couple's evanescent love is overwhelmed and rendered somewhat cloying and melodramatic. Mixed into this background are poverty, injustice, collective as well as individual culpability, and the Sacco-Vanzetti trial...
...somehow does not connect. Anderson was undoubtedly a major force, but his plays are better read than seen. The devices he used to break fresh ground in the '30s are old hat now; even if his themes of the injustice of American society and the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti are true, they are buried in the inevitable and agonizingly slow lurch towards a mawkish, yet depressing conclusion. Anderson's plays are strongly reminiscent of another expression of his times-Socialist Realism art. Like that famed WPA stuff, Winterset incorporates bold, tradition-smashing design with a sense of social justice...
...mass defections came as a surprise to the A.C.L.U. leadership. Founded in 1920, it has defended rights to freedom of speech and assembly on behalf of fascists and Ku Klux Klanners, as well as underdogs like Sacco and Vanzetti, the "Scottsboro boys" and conscientious objectors in World War II. Though consistently the country's foremost protector of the Bill of Rights, the A.C.L.U. had acquired only 60,000 members by 1960. Its period of large growth came in the late '60s and early '70s, when civil rights and liberties became a popular cause and thousands of young...
...reluctantly, then with greater assertiveness, began to intervene in the press, to organize committees, and brought their pleas to Gov. Alvin T. Fuller. Fuller finally responded by naming an advisory committee of three to re-examine the case and to decide on the guilt or innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti. His appointees were Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, president Samuel W. Stratton of MIT and Robert Grant, a retired probate judge. It was up to them to decide whether the two Italian anarchists should live or die. By this time it was July. I had decided that...