They Won't Forget

They Won't Forget (1937)

A southern town is rocked by scandal when teenager Mary Clay is murdered on Confederate Decoration Day. Andrew Griffin, a small-time lawyer with political ambitions, sees the crime as his ticket to the Senate if he can find the right victim to finger for the crime. He sets out to convict Robert Hale, a transplanted northerner who was Mary's teacher at the business school where she was killed. Despite the fact that all the evidence against Hale is circumstantial, Griffin works with a ruthless reporter to create a media frenzy of prejudice and hate against the teacher.

Erscheinungsdatum
1937-07-14
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (34)
Laufzeit
1 Std. 35 Min.
Genres
Drama, Mystery
Regie
Mervyn LeRoy

Besetzung

Wissenswertes

  • Auszeichnungen: 1 · Nominierungen: 0. Darunter: National Board of Review/Top Ten Filme

They Won't Forget is a 1937 American crime drama film directed by Mervyn LeRoy and starring Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Edward Norris, Otto Kruger, and Lana Turner. It marked the feature film debuts of both Dickson and Turner. The plot focuses on a trial in a Southern town, where a lynch mob and district attorney (Rains) accuse a Northern teacher (Norris) of the brutal murder of a teenage girl (Turner). It is based on the 1936 novel Death in the Deep South by Ward Greene, which was in turn a fictionalized account of a real-life case: the trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank after the murder of Mary Phagan in 1913 Atlanta, Georgia.

Production

They Won't Forget was adapted from the 1936 novel Death in the Deep South by Ward Greene. Greene's novel was based on the 1913 wrongful lynching murder of Leo Frank, the Jewish superintendent of a factory in Atlanta, Georgia, who was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old worker. The book was optioned for a film adaptation shortly after its publication by Warner Bros. studio head Jack L. Warner.

Screenwriter Aben Kandel completed a preliminary draft of They Won't Forget in January 1937. The explicit use of racist epithets in Greene's novel was significantly toned down in Kandel's screenplay. Despite this, Joseph Breen, who enforced the Hays Code, demanded that various alterations to be made, as Kandel's screenplay featured "numerous scenes of unnecessary drinking and, at least, one scene of drunkenness, perjured witnesses, a corrupt and…

After Breen's criticisms of the screenplay were assessed, Warner Bros. brought in screenwriter Robert Rossen to perform rewrites of Kandel's original script. Over several weeks in February 1937, Rossen and Kandel collaborated on a redraft; in particular, they rendered the police brutality implicit rather than explicit, and eliminated overt suggestion that district attorney Andrew Griffin was encouraging and abetting police corruption and evidence…

Claude Rains was cast in the lead role of Andrew Griffin, and later commented that he was "frightened to death" to accept the role, fearing he would be unable to execute a southern accent. To prepare for the part, Rains worked with a dialect coach from Louisiana. The film marked the feature debuts of Gloria Dickson as Sybil Hale, the wife of the accused Robert Hale, and fifteen-year-old Lana Turner as murder victim Mary Clay.

They Won't Forget was originally offered to director Fritz Lang, who passed on the project to instead direct Fury (1936), a similarly-themed crime drama based on the kidnapping and murder of Brooke Hart. Mervyn LeRoy was hired to direct after Lang declined.

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