They Won't Forget

Plot synopsis:
A southern town is rocked by scandal when teenager Mary Clay is murdered on Confederate Memorial Day. A district attorney with political ambitions, Andrew Griffin, sees the crime as way to the Senate if he can find the right scapegoat to be tried for the crime. He seeks out Robert Hale, Mary's teacher at the business school where she was killed. Even though all evidence against Hale is circumstantial, Hale happens to be from New York (Leo Frank was a Southerner from Texas, but he was Jewish and had been raised in New York), and Griffin works with reporter William Brock to create a media frenzy of prejudice and hatred against the teacher. The issue moves from innocence or guilt to the continuing bigotry and suspicion between South and North, especially given the significance of the day of the murder.
The film shows the immense pressures brought to bear on members of the community to help in the conviction - the black janitor who is induced to lie on the stand for fear he himself will be convicted if Hale is found innocent; the juror who is the sole holdout to a guilty verdict; and the barber who is afraid to testify to something he knows because it could exonerate Hale. Michael Gleason, Hale's lawyer, does his best, but Hale is convicted and sentenced to death.
The governor of the state, with the support of his wife, decides to commit political suicide by commuting Hale's death sentence to life imprisonment because the evidence is simply insufficient to send a man to his death. The townsfolk are enraged, and the murdered girl's brothers, who have been threatening all along to take matters into their own hands if Hale is not executed, plot and carry out Hale's abduction and lynching with the help of a vengeful mob.
Afterward, Hale's widow goes to Griffin's office to return a check he had sent her to help her out, telling him he cannot soothe his conscience that way. As he and Brock watch her leave the building, Brock wonders if Hale was guilty. Griffin replies without much concern, "I wonder."

Tags: revenge, suspenseful, murder, romantic, melodrama

Review:
Occasionally the characters give out unmotivated speeches (especially Hale's wife), but the movie is very well-written and acted with Claude Rain chewing the scenery again and again.
Gloria Dickson is very powerful as the defendant's wife, and Claude Rains is magnificent as the politically minded prosecutor, but Allyn Joslyn as the cynical, burnt out reporter steals the show.
South in this gripping courtroom drama helmed by the great Mervyn LeRoy. A dark haired, southern drawled Claude Rains has an actor's field day as D.A Andy Griffin.
He gets it when a Yankee school teacher (Edward Norris) is accused of murdering a high school girl (Fetching Lana Turner in her film debut)  Griffin turns the trial into a media circus and a kangaroo court.
Quick-paced film from the late thirties, directed by Mervyn Le Roy, They Won't Forget in an eminently memorable lesson in how gossip, rumor, innuendo and ignorance can get a man lynched.
A hideous crime rocks a Deep South community and those who exploited it know THEY WON'T FORGET the part they played in the shame & violence that ensued.Of all the hard-hitting dramas produced by Warner Brothers Studio in the 1930's, this was one of the most powerful.
An urgent plea against sectarian hatred & mindless violence, the film sweeps the viewer along to its ultimate shattering climax.Claude Rains gives a knock-out performance as the local politician who sees the murder as a chance to sweep him into the State Senate.
Using his considerable vocal talent - even with his somewhat bizarre idea of a Southern accent - Rains steamrollers over nearly everyone else in the cast, deftly showing his character's utter fixation on prosecuting the case.Kudos should also be extended to Edward Norris as the Northern teacher accused of the murder; Lana Turner as the victim; Elisha Cook Jr. as her strangely nervous boyfriend; and especially Clinton Rosemond as the terrified black janitor who discovers the crime.Although Warners is at pains at the outset to deny any connection the story might have with an actual occurrence, the film is roughly based on the notorious 1913 murder of Atlanta factory worker Mary Phagan..
Warner Brothers, known in the 1930s as the socially conscious studio, had a message to flog, and in this case it goes a bit overboard: No character has more than one dimension, and even that excellent actor Claude Rains, as the DA, snarls and rolls his eyes and gesticulates wildly, overdoing the blind ambition bit.
The role of a lifetime for actor Claude Rains, I was impressed by the performance of the actress who plays the wife of the victim of a trial that never should have been.
One of Warner Brothers' `hard-hitting' social comment dramas of the 1930s, They Won't Forget leaves viewers all riled up  though, today, maybe less at the judicial process in the Deep South than at Mervyn LeRoy's depiction of it in the movie.
Based not too loosely on the Mary Phagan murder case of 1913, it updates the events to the late Depression and also advances the victim's age (Phagan was 13; here, the victim  an unrecognizable Lana Turner, in her debut  is a student at a small business college).It's Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, and the college lets out early, unexpectedly for instructor Edward Norris, a Northerner.
In a small Southern town celebrating Confederate Memorial Day, a young woman (Lana Turner) is murdered.
Hale is arrested and tried but the anti-Northern sentiment running through the town guarantees his trial won't be fair.Great role for Claude Rains, who owns every scene he's in as a remorseless politician out to further his career regardless of cost.
The rest of the cast is made up of familiar faces, including Otto Kruger and Elisha Cook, Jr. Loosely based on the real story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man accused of murdering 13 year-old Mary Phagan in Georgia.
While Turner's appearance is brief, she was somewhat memorable here.As always, Claude Rains steals the show as an ambitious attorney, who will use this case as the prosecutor, to further his political career.
Mary Clay, played by Lana Turner (living up to her sweater girl fame) very early in her career is a student at a small southern town's business college.
Another one of those was the Leo Frank case where a Jewish man and a northerner was tried and found guilty of the murder of Mary Phagan in Georgia.
From that case the novel and the film They Won't Forget was constructed with the names and the religion of the defendant changed to protect God knows what.Even with the name changed to a white bread WASP name of Hale, Warner Brothers was taking a chance on losing the southern market with the making of They Won't Forget.
Edward Norris as the outsider, teacher at a small business school in a southern town is a man totally caught in the regional prejudices of a section of the country that is still fighting the War between the states.Norris is accused of murdering young Lana Turner in her breakthrough role as an attractive and saucy young teenager.
Rains portrays a man of frightening ambition and a type we're all too familiar with in real life.Although the Leo Frank case took place in the teen years and this film is set in the contemporary Thirties, things hadn't changed all that much in the south.
Strident but sober Forget is one cynical walk down the road of ambition.On Confederate Decoration Day student Mary Clay (Lana Turner in her memorable debut to movie audiences) is murdered at the holiday emptied school.
The defense strikes back by bringing a hot shot lawyer (Hardy Kruger) from up north to defend the teacher and he soon begins to poke holes in the prosecutions case but it fails to defuse the towns white hot anger.With the Leo Frank case as background and then communist writer Robert Rossen about to embark on a career exposing the corrupt underbelly of American society ( All the King's Men, The Hustler) They Won't Forget pulls no punches in its portrayal of southern yokels doing what they do best in Hollywood films, act irrationally with a strong sense of bias.
Lynching a black would be commonplace but convicting a Yankee of murder might make a man governor and that is just what Griffin has in mind as he enlists the press to help convict.As the power hungry DA Claude Rains goes over the top more than once in a bravura performance that calls for it even if he does at moments find his highly refined British accent wrestling with his southern twang.
They Won't Forget (1937) **** (out of 4) Terrific Warner drama about a school teacher (Edward Norris) from the North who's working in the South when one of his students his murdered.
(Claude Rains), wanting to rise in the political game, charges the teacher with the murder not because of evidence but because the Southerners think he's guilty due to being from the North.
It deals with a miscarriage of justice inspired by a real-life case that was later also treated in the 1988 TV-movie THE MURDER OF MARY PHAGAN (starring Jack Lemmon), which I foolishly never watched despite once owning a copy of!
Anyway, what we have here is a man convicted of murder solely on the strength of circumstantial evidence: he just happens to be a Northerner employed in the South, and the events kick off on the former Confederacy's Memorial Day – when the sentiments for the old life and resentment towards the 'enemy' are most apt to be rekindled!
The fact that it is undercast (nominal star Rains was hardly a big box-office draw, already middle-aged when this emerged, and playing a nasty character into the bargain!) – whether it was done to achieve greater realism or to counter the intrinsic hysteria at its core is debatable (still, a debuting Allyn Joslyn is effective as an unscrupulous reporter, a dark-haired Lana Turner landed her first important role here as the murder victim and Elisha Cook Jr. appears as the latter's unlikely beau) – and also because it came hot on the heels of another superb 'mob justice'-themed effort, namely Fritz Lang's FURY (1936; ironically, an MGM picture); apparently, Lang was even approached to helm this one but declined!
It's a good film and i didn't even recognize that the murdered girl was Lana Turner..
It's a story that still resonates because it feeds into the ambitions of raising stars in politics, as they tend to associate themselves with the kind of yellow journalism that will do everything to ruin lives and in this case send an innocent man to his death.Sadly, Mr. Leroy chose to direct the film telling his actors to emote, as he obviously had no way to reining some of the performances.
An excellent actor like Claude Rains' account of his character, the evil D.A., Andy Griffin, goes for histrionics, instead of having him play the part as a sly and suave man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
Have liked and respected various films of the always competent Mervyn LeRoy, especially 'Random Harvest', 'Waterloo Bridge' and 'Gold Diggers of 1933', and have always found Claude Rains a fine actor.While maybe not quite one of the all-time greats or as great as the above, 'They Won't Forget' is a powerful and not easy to forget film that deserves far more credit and exposure.
Have seen quite a number of very good to outstanding films recently and throughout my time as a reviewer here that are criminally underseen and under-appreciated, and it makes me sad to see that treatment when there are far inferior, and in some cases not good, films that make a lot of money and far more accessible in availability regardless of whether they're good or not.Sure, 'They Won't Forget' is not the most visually beautiful, although it is well shot, or evocative film in the world and occasionally the content is hammered home too much, but the film was so searingly powerful and stirred so many emotions in me that they were not major issues and more like nit-picks.LeRoy's direction, as it rightly should be, is no-nonsense and he keeps the storytelling tight and concise.
A lot of memorable scenes, but particularly notable examples are Gloria Dickson's final speech, which gave me chills, and Lana Turner on the side-walk.Have no issues with the acting, helped by the writing and that they have compellingly real characters that don't irritate or feel underdeveloped with clear and understandable motivations.
Edward Norris gives one of the better performances for any defendant in a film courtroom drama for me, and Otto Kruger and Elisha Cook Jr do well against type.
Claude Rains Unrestrained, Over the Top Courtroom Antics is the Film's Weakest Link in an Otherwise Scathing Indictment of America's Ongoing (even today) Battle with Prejudice, Bigotry, Ethnocentrism, and an Overall Stacked and Rigged System on Many Levels.WB Studios Again Solidifies its Place as the Socially Conscious Studio in This Unforgettable Story Based on a Real Life 1913 Event.
This is a fictionalized version of the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan (here called Mary Clay, played by 16 or 17 year old Lana Turner) made 24 years later and before three confessions were made that pointed to the guilt of the black janitor, so at the time of the filming the writers and audience lacked the certainty which we have that a innocent man was lynched.The "what" of title "They Won't Forget" is not the murder, but the fact that the South for four years was a separate country which proudly defended their distinct way of life.
A fictionalized account of the Leo Frank case, who was falsely accused and convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan, and later hanged by a mob.
"They won't forget" is a tragedy.The first pictures show six old confederates veterans who play the part of the antique choir.They 'll come back when the drama is over."They won't forget" works as the mechanism of a clock.It's North versus South,Mother versus Mother, populace versus law ,integrity versus political career...It almost outshines Le Roy's previous masterpieces such as "I'm a fugitive from a chain gang" (both Paul Muni and Edward Norris portray men who cannot adapt themselves to the society they're part of:Muni because he 's just returned from war,Norris because he is one of those hateful Yankees for those southerners .The movie is absorbing from start to finish and contains unforgettable scenes: -The parade ,our memorial day (which has not the same meaning for Hale) -Hale caught up in the system when the cops come to question him.-The black janitor,crying "I didn't do it!I didn't do it!I'm afraid!
.The actor's performance is intense matching Claude Rains' and the rest of the uniformly good cast's .-Joe Turner (Elisha Cook jr) claiming his innocence to Mary's sister ;it's so realistic we can see him sputter!
-the scene when Hale's wife (Gloria Dickson) gets his mother at the station where people are looking forward to watching a sensational trial.Everybody gathers for the feast as they will do in Billy Wilder's "Ace in the hole" (1951)-the beautiful scene between the governor and his wife;this is the only one which leaves some hope about the human race.-the train where we feel an impending threat,hellbound train indeed!-Sybil's final words ,when she curses those who killed her husband ;actually the D.A.was not the only one responsible for the tragedy.The whole town played a part,from a coward barber to a hateful school principal ,from the greedy for scoops journalists to anonymous avengers ."They won't forget" is a must..
So, this cynical clod (so well played by Claude Rains), does nothing to help exonerate the man and encourages the mob mentality that is growing in the town.What I particularly liked about the film is that it never ran from the course it had taken and copped out for a "Hollywood" ending.
Frank was abducted from the local jail-house and taken out in the woods and hung for the murder of 12 year-old Atlanta girl Mary Phagan.The movie goes along the same lines as the real story that it's based on with Leo Frank portrayed as a business professor, not the owner of a pencil factory, from the north named Perry Hale, Edward Norris.
Besides that small change in history the movie nevertheless is a strong incitement of how emotions can easily take over a community and lead to an innocent mans, even though it's never really proved if or not Hale was in fact innocent, unjust conviction and later murder.Hale was seen at the business school where he was a professor and where pretty 16 year-old Mary Clay, Lana Turner, attended and was in fact a bit infatuated with him.
Seeing a chance to make a name for himself, and get elected senator, local D.A Andrew Griffin, Claude Raines, took charge of prosecuting Hale and with the town already strongly prejudice against him, in Hale being an outsider and Yankee to boot, the outcome of the trial was already a forgone conclusion.Hale's trial, and jury, was so prejudice against him that after being convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to the electric chair that Governor Mountford,Paul Everton,felt that he at least should have a new trial, with a change of venue, in order to positively prove his innocence not the angry lynch mob that he faced back in Flodden.Sacrificing his political career Gov. Mountford let his conscience replace his future in politics by commenting Hale's death sentence to life imprisonment.
Sybil threw the check that Griffin gave her back in his face wanting to have nothing more to do with him and the town of Floddon as she walked out of his office and his life as well as town forever.P.S the biggest tragedy besides the tragic lynching of Perry Hale is that the actual murdered, if Hale was in fact innocent, of young Mary Clay was never brought to justice.
A pretty good story of the arrest, conviction, and lynching of a New York teacher (Edward Norris) in the South, blamed for the murder of a young Mary Clay (the braless Lana Turner) of which he may or may not be guilty.
Excellent film based on a true story, although not Claude Rains at this best.
First, it's loosely based on the trial and lynching of Leo Frank after the murder of Mary Phagan back in 1913.
They do a nice job here with the character who appears to be innocent, but who says things and acts in little ways that would lead some people to think he is guilty.Otto Kruger as Michael Gleason Allyn Joslyn, a character actor who usually did nicely in comedy, is here as a reporter, but I wasn't very impressed.Gloria Dickson, who in real life died in a fire after a short career in films, does reasonably nicely as the charged husband's wife.The murdered girl is played by none other than Lana Turner.
Nevertheless, it is an honorable acting performance.Elisabeth Risdon plays the convicted murderer's mother; a very dependable and recognizable character actress.Aside from the murder case itself, an important aspect of the film was that it took place in the South, thus implying that Southerners were bigots (no comment as to whether that's an appropriate observation; you decide).
A key instigator, the reporter Bill Brock (Allyn Joslyn), unscrupulously uses the murder of Mary Clay (Lana Turner), conflating rumors and suspicions about Hale, to stimulate his career.
Based on Ward Greenes novel -"Death In The Deep South" there are several things that make this film outstanding.Claude Rains as DA Andy Griffin is outstanding in pursuit of a murderer of a young woman in a town where the previous 2 murders remain unsolved.
Sure Griffin gets Professor Robert Hale (Edward Norris) convicted, but the film deliberately does not prove beyond any doubt whether or not he is really the killer.