THEY WON'T FORGET (62)

Directed by: Mervyn LeRoy (1937)

Starring: Claude Rains, Edward Norris, Allyn Joslyn, Lana Turner

The Pitch: An ambitious DA in a small Southern town uses the murder of a young girl for political ends, leading to a miscarriage of justice.

Theo Sez: Permanently perched on the edge of hysteria, which perhaps explains its reputation as a harrowing piece of ultra-realism : it is astonishingly harsh and downbeat, one of the handful of films (especially, though not exclusively, Hollywood films) where Justice is emphatically not done at the end, but you get the feeling it's less a case of reflecting real-life ambivalence than of getting so caught up in its social-comment fervour it forgot about the actual murder (even the opening credits are in huge, mountainous letters, as for a Biblical epic). Its special quality - its weakness, though also the source of its pulsating over-excitement - is that it doesn't address a specific social problem (chain-gangs, or yellow journalism), as with previous, similarly breathless and hard-hitting Warners movies of the 30s, so much as put an entire society on trial : the title, as explained by a bunch of ancient Civil War vets in the opening scene, refers to Southern prejudice against Yankee outsiders, and it soon becomes clear that all the townspeople - just about everyone onscreen, in fact - range from accomplices to outright villains, all infected with hatred and bigotry. The result is weird, giving us nobody to root for (the nominal hero is a non-character, even a bit obnoxious) and no-one (i.e. too many) to side against - try and imagine Kafka as a message-movie, done by Oliver Stone. There's great bits - the Negro janitor's abject terror at discovering the corpse, knowing he'll automatically be blamed (all he can do is whimper "I didn't do it" over and over), or the murdered girl's bimbo classmates babbling excitedly to the papers the day after her death - but the general level isn't far removed from the rabble-rousing it so decries (and Rains, in one of his few bad performances, lets his Deep South accent wobble alarmingly towards the Cockney) ; worth a look certainly, but go for FURY or INTRUDER IN THE DUST first.