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By JOHN FLEMING
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 15, 2001
Anton Coppola's opera Sacco & Vanzetti joins a crowded field. There have been quite a few other artistic treatments of the case known as the "trial of the century."
In Winterset, a play by Maxwell Anderson that was a Broadway hit in 1935 and made into a movie the next year, Burgess Meredith (on stage and screen) played a young man modeled on Sacco's son, determined to find out who had been responsible for a crime pinned on his father. A recent play about the case is Louis Lippa's Sacco & Vanzetti, a vaudeville version that was given a staged reading in January at the Gorilla Theatre in Tampa. Upton Sinclair wrote a 1928 novel on the case called Boston. In the 1940s, Woody Guthrie wrote a series of ballads on Sacco and Vanzetti, but he wasn't pleased with the results, and they weren't released until 1964 (with an additional song by Pete Seeger) on a Folkways album. Joan Baez wrote The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti for a 1971 Italian movie, Sacco e Vanzetti, with a score by Ennio Morricone.
Probably the definitive history of the case is Herbert R. Ehrmann's 1969 book, The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti.