They Won't Forget (1937) on Netflix
A teenager, Mary Clay, is murdered at her Southern business school. District attorney Andrew Griffin, seeking a Senate seat, settles on her teacher, Robert Hale, and turns the town against him.
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- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.2/102,157 votes
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Plot summary
Mary Clay, a teenager in a Southern town, is murdered at the business school she attends, on Confederate Memorial Day, and the killing becomes a public scandal. Andrew Griffin, the district attorney, wants a Senate seat and needs someone to stand trial for the crime. He settles on Robert Hale, a teacher at the school and a newcomer from New York City, though the case against him is only circumstantial. With the reporter Bill Brock, Griffin builds a campaign of prejudice in the press, and the question in town shifts from guilt toward the old suspicion between South and North.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about They Won't Forget (1937)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
They Won't Forget draws on the real 1913 case of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent in Atlanta, Georgia, accused of murdering thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan and later lynched; the story reached the screen through Ward Greene's 1936 novel Death in the Deep South.- Atlanta's Jewish leaders agreed with the ban that kept They Won't Forget out of Georgia, fearing the film could reignite antisemitism in the state, even though the screenplay had cut any explicit hint that the accused teacher, Robert Hale, was Jewish. Director Mervyn LeRoy and screenwriters Robert Rossen and Aben Kandel were all Jewish.
- Hays Code enforcer Joseph Breen demanded changes to Aben Kandel's screenplay, objecting to scenes of drinking and drunkenness, perjured witnesses, a corrupt and dishonest jury, brutalizing by the police, excessive brutality and a suggestion of mob violence that leads to a lynching.
- The film is best known for launching the screen career of Lana Turner; film historian Glenn Erickson says she drew attention in a scandalous shot showing her walking on the street in an ostentatiously tight sweater.
- Twenty years after its release, once Lana Turner had become a major film star, They Won't Forget was theatrically reissued and marketed around her role, even though she appears onscreen for only twelve minutes.
- Claude Rains said he was "frightened to death" to accept the lead role of district attorney Andrew Griffin, fearing he could not manage a Southern accent, and prepared with a dialect coach from Louisiana.
- In the documentary I Am Not Your Negro, James Baldwin's unpublished notes recall the impression the face of the terrified black suspect left on him.
