"The Much-Disputed Case"

The "good shoemaker" and the "poor fish peddler" who were executed in 1927 after a bitter, seven-year battle in court, in the press and in many minds, keep agitating American imaginations. Composer Marc Blitzstein is writing an opera about them, and an off-Broadway producer is planning a musical. This week NBC presents the second installment of its two-part Sacco-Vanzetti Story, billed as a "dramatic interpretation of the much-disputed case." Taken together, the two taped installments provide two absorbing hours, somewhat marred by overly insistent pleading.

Somehow suspenseful, although the outcome was obviously known from the start, the opening hour showed how the two anarchists were almost accidentally arrested for a robbery and murder, how the case against them grew from the teetering memory of witnesses, and how--standing in a cagelike dock and facing a flower-decked bench--they heard the verdict. This week's Part II deals with the long, futile fight to save Sacco and Vanzetti from the chair--the hunt for new evidence, the repeated appeals, the worldwide furor, and the final confrontation of the accused and their judge as he imposes sentence after Vanzetti's powerful speech: "I am so convinced to be right that if you can kill me two times, I would live again to do what I have done already."

Author Reginald Rese's play is hampered by a documentary style that lets a narrator (Ben Grauer) appear to talk more than the principals, and by the author's constant, heavy-handed insistence that his protagonists are innocent victims of political and race prejudice, thus never allowing the viewer to draw that conclusion on his own. The prosecutor is shown as ruthlessly concerned with his own ambitions, the Governor of Massachusetts is a millionaire, hence clearly untrustworthy, witnesses are bought and browbeaten. Regardless of whether or not all this black villainy is true in detail (and Playwright Rose has his documents well in hand), it weakens the drama. The narrator concedes, almost offhandedly, that the jury rendered its verdict in good faith; but after all the blatant hostility of the judge and prosecution--and, seemingly, of society itself--the play admits no possibility of tragic error, only of deliberate malevolence.

What saves the play from such flaws is the peculiar power of Sacco and Vanzetti themselves, as it emerges from the broken but hauntingly eloquent English of their speeches, letters and diaries. In superb performances. Actors Martin Balsam (Sacco) and Steven Hill (Vanzetti) capture a strange mixture of gentleness and violence, a quality of patience and bewilderment in an alien, hostile world. One of the truly moving scenes seen on TV shows the two men in death cells, writing their last letters. There are Sacco's farewell words to his son: "And you will also not forget to love me a little, for I do--Oh, Sonny!, thinking so much and so often of you . . ." The words lift the scene above matters of law or even justice to the simple level of love and sorrow.

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