They Won't Forget

A southern town is shaken when a girl called Mary Clay is murdered on Confederate Decoration Day. Andrew Griffin, a lawyer with ambitions, sees the case as his road to the Senate and needs only the right defendant. He picks Robert Hale, a teacher who came down from the north. Every piece of evidence is circumstantial, and with a reporter beside him Griffin builds a lynching atmosphere anyway. Mervyn LeRoy's 1937 film comes from Ward Greene's novel, which came in turn from the case of Leo Frank, tried and then lynched after the murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta in 1913. The film replaces Frank's Jewishness with being a northerner, which means the antisemitism at the centre of the real case is left out. It was Lana Turner's first film, and Georgia effectively kept it off its screens.