Robert Rossen Movies
American screenwriter, director, and producer Robert Rossen, born Robert Rosen, was raised by Russian-Jewish immigrants in the often violent ghettos of the Lower East Side in New York. As a young man he was briefly a professional boxer before beginning his show business career as a director and playwright in stock and off-Broadway productions. Rossen was never a great playwright, though his socialist-oriented plays enjoyed some success. In 1936, after seeing his latest production, The Body Beautiful, close on Broadway after only four performances, Rossen signed a contract as a screenwriter with Warner Bros. He worked there, writing over ten features, for seven years and worked with directors such as Lloyd Bacon and Mervyn LeRoy. His interest and affiliation with the Communist party greatly influenced his writing. By 1945, he had abandoned the party, but his early activities led to his being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. It took them four years to get around to trying and blacklisting him; during that time, Rossen independently produced several notable films such as Body and Soul (1947) and All the King's Men (1949). In 1953, Rossen chose to "rat" on many of his peers to the Committee and so was able to resume his career. He did not return to Hollywood, but did continue making films; with some notable exceptions, such as the multiple-Oscar-nominated film The Hustler (1961), most of his films were not terribly successful. In 1964, he made Lilith, considered by many modern critics Rossen's greatest film. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide- 1937
This hard-hitting Warner Bros. courtroom drama begins with the usual "Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental" disclaimer. Filmgoers with long memories, however, recognized Robert Rossen and Aben Kandel's screenplay as a blow-by-blow recreation of the Leo Frank-Mary Phagan case of 1915. Phagan, a 14-year-old employee in a Marietta, GA pencil factory, was found murdered. The bulk of the evidence pointed to a black janitor (who actually confessed to the crime years after the fact), but race-baiting Atlanta newspaper publisher Tom Watson decided to go after Leo Frank, the Northern Jew who owned the factory where Mary worked. "We can lynch a nigger any time," the politically ambitious Watson is alleged to have said, "but when do we get a chance to hang a Yankee Jew?" Thanks largely to Watson's "guilt by headline" campaign, and to Fulton County's cooperative solicitor general, Frank was found guilty and sentenced to death. Georgia Governor John M. Slaton, who all along smelled something fishy in the case, commuted Frank's case to life imprisonment (and was ruined politically as a result). En route to prison, Frank was abducted by a mob and lynched, an incident that boosted the prestige of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. Aben Kandel dramatized this appalling miscarriage of justice in his novel Death in the Deep South, which served as the basis for They Won't Forget. In Mervyn LeRoy's film version, Lana Turner (in a star-making turn) plays Mary Clay, a teen-aged typing school student who dresses garishly and flirts with every man she meets. Mary is later found murdered; the last person to see her alive was her teacher, recently arrived Northerner Robert Hale (Edward Norris). Once more, a black janitor (played as a superstitious moron by Clinton Rosemond) is the most likely suspect, but the ambitious district attorney (Claude Rains) seems sincere in his belief that Hale is guilty. Once Hale is sentenced to death, the governor, played by Paul Everton, commutes his sentence, serene in the belief that, once his career is finished, he'll be able to retire peacefully (real-life governor Slaton did not go down so benignly). Except for the removal of the original case's anti-Semitic elements, They Won't Forget is stark, powerhouse filmmaking, one of the best of Warners' "social protest" films of the 1930s. It was remade as the 1987 TV movie The Murder of Mary Phagan starring Jack Lemmon, Kevin Spacey, Peter Gallagher, and Charles S. Dutton (as well as as the unsuccessful 1998 Broadway musical Parade). ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Claude Rains, Edward Norris, (more)
