real irony with this remake

During the war the story could be made with its political message intact, undoubtedly helped by the fact that Vanzetti wasn't a Nazi although there was a Red Scare that was acute 1919-1920 and a lot of people thought Communism should replace Capitalism in the 30s. There were various bombings by anarchists in the Twenties including noon on Wall Street to destabilize the capitalistic system where pieces of blown up horse and cart festooned blocks of downtown (the 1920 version of 9/11), as well as the shooting of McKinley in 1901 by an avowed anarchist. (The Front Page, of course, did a great job showing the hysteria of those times and the people who made it worse.)

After the war when one might expect us to celebrate the four freedoms that were so well advertised as our motivation for fighting the war, the movie was remade as a McCarthy era expurgation of the idea of free speech and standing up to the forces that would brand a person as one of the enemy simply for reading to an audience a letter allegedly written by anarchist Vanzetti. Apparently by then the studio was afraid of being branded as one of the enemy simply for having an actor read to an audience a letter allegedly written by anarchist Vanzetti. I wonder what Thurber thought of THAT. If he had written it in the postwar era it would have had to be an allegory like High Noon to be put on film.

Ah, the "simpler times" of yesteryear when evil ran riot because too many good people did nothing because they feared career, income, and reputation would be destroyed if they spoke up--which I kind of think was the point of the original movie under all the love triangulating.