They Won't Forget (Warner Bros.). On Confederate Memorial Day (April 26) the little town of Flodden, Ga., takes a half holiday. In the town park, a handful of tottering Civil War veterans doze and chatter while they wait to march in the parade. At the Buxton Business College classes are dismissed early and the school's principal is surprised when one of the girls, pretty Mary Clay (Lana Turner) comes back to the classroom to get a vanity case she has forgotten. At the town cemetery, the show-going old Governor pays sincere tribute to the dead and is sardonically congratulated by the steel-trap district attorney who is jealous of his job. All this is so much in the routine of a hot spring afternoon, that the best thing the town's star reporter (Allyn Joslyn) can think of to do when he drops inat police headquarters after writing his parade story, is to sit down in a patrol car and take a nap. His nap is interrupted when the telephone on the sergeant's desk begins to ring. It is the janitor in the Buxton Building, stammering out the astounding news that Mary Clay has just been brutally murdered.

In They Won't Forget, Director Mervyn Le Roy uses this situation for the most devastating study of mob violence and sectional hatred the screen has yet dared to present. There are three major suspects in the case of Mary Clay: the school's principal, the Negro janitor and Robert Hale (Edward Norris), a young Northerner who taught Mary's class and who was seen coming out of the building after the crime. To District Attorney Griffin (Claude Rains), the principal is too big a personage and the janitor too small, to serve his purpose of a spectacular conviction. Reporter Bill Brook helps him pin the crime on Hale. The evidence consists principally of a blood spot on Hale's coat, which might have come from a barber's cut. More threatening is a hot surge of Southern hatred. When Hale's wife (Gloria Dickson) gets a Northern detective and a crack Northern lawyer (Otto Kruger) to aid her husband, his doom is practically sealed.

Courtroom scenes are a dramatic standby, but for bleak, malevolent drama, the screen has never achieved a better one than the trial of Robert Hale. It ends, when a string of cowardly witnesses have given their lying testimony, with Attorney Griffin's masterly peroration which the jurors do not need to convince them that Hale is guilty. Aware of the circumstances of the trial, the Governor commutes Hale's sentence of death to life imprisonment, but Flodden's seething population has by this time long since made up its mind how the affair must end. The train taking Hale to prison stops beside a swamp and an angry crowd breaks into the baggage car where he is sitting with two detectives. Hale opens the door to jump, but looking up at him are the faces of the lynch mob. There is nothing much left of They Won't Forget after that except Reporter Brook's mildly rueful comment to District Attorney Griffin after Hale's widow has called them a pair of murderers: "Now that it's over, Andy, I wonder if he really did it?"

Based on Ward Greene's novel Death in the Deep South, They Won't Forget would be considerably more palatable as hot weather entertainment if it could be regarded as pure fiction. Actually the story closely parallels the 1915 Atlanta case of Leo Frank, Northern factory superintendent who was tried for and, on circumstantial evidence, convicted of the murder of a factory worker named Mary Phagan. When Frank's death sentence was commuted, a mob raided the Milledgeville prison farm where a fellow inmate had already tried to kill him by slashing his throat, took him no mi. away by car, hanged him near Mary Phagan's birthplace.

As a masterpiece of cinema production, They Won't Forget is by no means flawless. In the effort to achieve striking types, Mervyn Le Roy picked a cast largely made up of unknowns, with a better eye for facial characteristics than ear for the niceties of authentic Southern dialect. It is questionable whether the picture's elaborately noncommittal attitude about who actually murdered Mary Clay adds to its dramatic impact. With these minor faults, They Won't Forget remains an enormously effective item in the too-intermittent cycle of socially conscious Warner Brothers' films, the best monument to date in the screen career of the man who started the cycle in 1932 with / Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Director Mervyn Le Roy.

According to Director Le Roy, his responsibility for the major portion of the U. S. screen's social consciousness is wholly accidental. He classes all stories under two heads: 1) "show case" stories, which provide an advantageous display shelf for famous players, like The King and the Chorus Girl (Fernand Gravet, Joan Blondell) and, 2) "heart" stories, which involve life, death and other major matters. That an unusually large proportion of Director Le Roy's heart stories have social themes may be a subconscious expression of his own career which includes a vault from class to class as quick and acrobatic as any ever made in Hollywood. Son of a Jewish San Francisco coffee dealer who was ruined by the earthquake, Mervyn Le Roy quit public school at 10, became a newsboy first on the street and then on the stage. Fired as an actor by Jack Warner because he would not fall off a horse in a Western, Le Roy returned to the films as a gagman for First National, became a continuity writer, then a director, then husband of Harry Warner's daughter Doris, then--last year, at 35--a producer and Hollywood's latest Boy Wonder.* Director Le Roy believes that writing is 60% of a film, acting 20%, directing 20%, producing the nebulous factor that holds the whole together. A wearer of gay sport clothes, a chain smoker of huge pallid cigars, a talker in Hollywood jargon, the U. S. cinema's ablest social propagandist coaxes his cast with pep-talks between shots, uses high heels to make himself look taller than his 5 ft. 3 in., works closely with his writers, refuses to wear glasses for fear they will spoil his eyes for Sunday tennis. Doris Le Roy, who used to help him scout plays, several weeks ago dumbfounded her father by taking a job as writer for Twentieth Century-Fox's Producer Darryl Zanuck. Mervyn Le Roy's next picture will be a show case item--Carole Lombard and Fernand Gravet in a Technicolor musical.

Topper (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). As long as the current vogue of madcap comedy persisted, it was inevitable that Hollywood would sometime turn to the late Author Thorne Smith, most strenuous producer of the farcical novel. For Hal Roach, experienced producer of innumerable Our Gang and Laurel & Hardy comedies, producing Author Smith's Topper signalizes his entry into full-length sophistication. Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) is the humorless, repressed president of National Security Bank. Biggest stockholder of National Security is Playboy George Kerby (Gary Grant) who detests banking as much as he enjoys carousing with his gay wife Marion (Constance Bennett). Waking up in his roadster parked on Wall Street. George dashes into the bank in time to disrupt a board meeting by singing. Equally untamed, Marion invades Banker Topper's private office to pull his ears, slide into his chair and playfully flash her trim legs.

That night when their automobile overturns on a wooded road, the Kerbys are instantly killed and transformed into ghosts. As ghosts they repent their irresponsible lives as humans, pledge themselves to perform one worthwhile deed: to brighten the impeccable, humdrum life of Cosmo Topper. Thenceforth George and Marion surround him, always able to speak and to act but half the time invisible. Banker Topper, powerless against an ectoplasmic enigma, is driven about in a car whose wheels turn and whose doors open at the eery touch of unseen hands. At the Kerby penthouse he is liberally dosed with champagne, dances the clock around with Marion when she materializes on top of the bookcase. Minute he tries to return to work, Marion, unseen, forces his hat and cane upon him, lures him away to a resort hotel for a weekend. Irrepressible, whether flesh or spirit, Marion at least takes care never to be caught in Topper's room by suspicious hotel detectives. Scrupulously omitted in the film is Author Smith's scene in which Topper is bedded with the ghost. Trick Topper sequences: water in a shower bath bouncing off Miss Bennett's invisible figure; sheep dogs hurtling through the air; Roland Young, superb as a tosspot, reeling across the floor seemingly unsupported.

Exclusive (Paramount) hinges on the debatable proposition that high-principled newspapers possess conscientious reporters who do a good turn daily and scorn offers of higher-paid jobs from unethical publishers. Crack Assistant City Editor Ralph Houston (Fred MacMurray), dependable Newshawk Tod Swain (Charlie Ruggles) and the entire staff of the Mountain City World flatly refuse to work for Racketeer Charles Gilette (Lloyd Nolan) when he buys up the rival, sensational Sentinel. One who cynically berates them for their highmindedness is Swain's daughter Vina (Frances Farmer), the assistant city editor's fiancee. Ambitious, headstrong, spiteful, after a spat with Ralph she goes to work for the Sentinel, in a by-line story libelously contends that the elevators in the big Franklyn department store are unsafe. Publisher Gilette, warring for circulation, proves the charge by having a henchman grease the elevator cables, causing a horrible crash. Lest Vina discover the Sentinel's connection with the tragedy, Gilette has her temporarily removed from town. At the cost of his life the World's shrewd old Tod Swain successfully exposes Gilette as a murderer. Daughter Vina is thereby journalistically and romantically redeemed. Least routine bit of reporting: MacMurray and Ruggles investigating whether the electric light inside a refrigerator really is extinguished when the refrigerator door is shut.

Also Showing

The Devil is Driving (Columbia): Richard Dix and Joan Perry in a melodramatic tract on the perils of motorcycle policemen and the evils of fast driving.

Super-Sleuth (RKO): Comedy about a dim-witted movie actor (Jack Oakie) who tries to utilize the technique he has learned in screen mystery plays to solve a real crime.

Current & Choice

A Day at the Races (Groucho, Chico & Harpo Marx); The Road Back (John King, Richard Cromwell); King Solomon's Mines (Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Anna Lee, Roland Young. Paul Robeson); Wee-Willie Winkle (Shirley Temple. Victor McLaglen); Knight Without Armor (Marlene Dietrich. Robert Donato.

*Director Le Roy is not to be confused with Baby LeRoy (Winnebrenner) who now, aged 5, has outgrown his 1933-34 baby roles (A Bedtime Story, Tillie & Gus, Miss Fane's Baby is Stolen, The Lemon Drop Kid), is reputedly contemplating a screen comeback as a Junior G-Man.

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