Now virtually out of circulation due to the expiration of the underlying story rights, They Won't Forget is one of the strongest Hollywood films of social protest from the Depression Era. That it should be better known today as the film in which Lana Turner made her “sweater” debut in a bit part than as the last great protest film of the thirties says more about the state of awareness of film viewers than about the contributions of committed filmmakers like Mervyn LeRoy (who had already castigated Southern bigotry and extra-legal terrorism in his 1932 classic, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang) during a period in which Warner Brothers turned out dozens of crusading pictures on capital punishment, mining conditions, sharecropper oppression, joblessness and right-wing fascist threats.

They Won't Forget deals with a subject of widespread popular concern at the time: an NAACP study showed that 99% of the lynchings committed since 1882 had gone unpunished; a federal antilynching bill up for approval in the Senate was stalled and eventually killed in 1935 by a Southern filibuster.

Claude Rains plays a rabble-rousing, politically ambitious Southern D.A. who chooses a Northern teacher as a scapegoat in the case of a murdered coed. In the “trial of the century,” the North charges prejudice, the South interference; the New York attorney is stoned, and witnesses recant or enlarge on their testimonies.

They Won't Forget was hailed by the New York Times for “the quiet intensity of its narrative, the simplicity of Mervyn LeRoy's direction, its integrity of purpose, the even perfection of its cast.”

Our 16mm print was recently struck from a 35mm print donated to the Library of Congress. There have not been any prints in distribution for many years.