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The Murder of Mary Phagan is 1988 two-part American Television miniseries starring Jack Lemmon and dramatizing the true story of Leo Frank, a factory manager charged with and convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl, a factory worker named Mary Phagan, in Atlanta in 1913. The trial was sensational and controversial. After Frank's legal appeals had failed, the governor of Georgia in 1915 commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment, destroying his own career in the process. In 1915 Frank was kidnapped from prison and lynched by a small group of prominent men of Marietta, Georgia.

Written by Larry McMurtry, produced by George Stevens, Jr., and directed by William "Billy" Hale, the miniseries stars Lemmon and features Kevin Spacey, Rebecca Miller, Peter Gallagher, Charles Dutton, Richard Jordan, Cynthia Nixon, Dylan Baker and William H. Macy. Lemmon noted during a publicity appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson shortly before the miniseries was broadcast that the cast was the best with which he had ever worked.

The film was shot in Richmond, Virginia, extensively in Shockoe Bottom, with a running time of 251 minutes (over 4 hours), originally broadcast over two evenings by NBC.

Cast

 * Jack Lemmon as Gov. ohn Slaton
 * Richard Jordan as Hugh Dorsey
 * Robert Prosky as Tom Watson
 * Peter Gallagher as Leo Frank
 * Kathryn Walker as Sally Slaton
 * Rebecca Miller as Lucille Frank
 * Paul Dooley as William Burns
 * Charles Dutton as Jim Conley
 * Kevin Spacey as Wes Brent
 * Cynthia Nixon as Doreen
 * Dylan Baker as the Governor's Assistant
 * William H. Macy as Randy (credited as W.H. Macy)
 * Kevin Kravitz as Jurist (unbilled)
 * William Newman
 * Russell Murray as Militia Guard (unbilled)

Plot
On April 26th, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day, a day set aside to remember the armed forces of the Confederacy, most of the stores and business were closed in Georgia, as they were in other Southern states. However, one of the offices in the National Pencil Company in Atlanta was open that day. Inside, superintendent Leo Frank, a young Cornell University graduate, was working on his financial report and delivering wages to the employees. One employee, 13-year-old Mary Phagan, stopped by to obtain her wages. Mary Phagan was murdered in the factory where she worked for only 10 cents per hour. The next day, Phagan’s body was found by an African American worker, Newt Lee, in the basement of the factory. Reportedly, she had been strangled and struck on the head and sexually assaulted. Several strange notes were found near the body, almost incomprehensible, describing a “tall black negro.” Of course, Lee was the first suspect. The second suspect was the company’s sweeper, another African American named Jim Conley, who had been at the factory on the day she disappeared, but initially denied any wrongdoing. After continuous interrogation he implicated Leo Frank, his employer. When Frank was questioned, he explained that Conley’s story was a fabrication. In Frank’s version of the story, Mary had collected her wages and left the office, whereupon he finished work and left home. However, at trial, Frank was found guilty by a jury. The judge sentenced him to death by hanging. The “Leo Frank case” gained huge national interest and increased anti-Semitism across the country. The New York Times and Collier’s Weekly argued for Frank’s innocence and against the general public opinion which fueled anti-Semitic policies. Although most Georgians felt that justice would finally be served by an execution, the Northerners criticized Frank’s sentence as a futile attempt by Georgia’s authorities to make up for their inability to find and prosecute the person who were truly responsible for Mary’s death. Frank’s legal team appealed the sentence and after a lengthy process the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The public were outraged and quickly a group of local prominent men calling themselves the “Knights of Mary Phagan” planned to kidnap Frank and deliver their own form of justice. Frank was abducted from prison on August 16, 1915, and was summarily lynched around 7:00 am the next day. Before he was killed, he asked that his wedding ring be given to his wife.

Honors
The film won the 1988 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries: George Stevens Jr. (producer), Outstanding Editing for a Miniseries: Single Camera Production by John A. Martinelli (editor), and Outstanding Sound Editing for a Miniseries: Rich Harrison (supervising sound editor/sound editor), Tom Cornwell (sound editor), Peter Harrison (sound editor), Thomas McCullen (sound editor), Stan Siegel (sound editor), Tally Paulos (sound editor), Allan K. Rosen (supervising music editor), and the National Broadcasting Company.

It also won the 1989 Eddie (American Cinema Editors) for Best Edited Episode from a Miniseries: John A. Martinelli.

Its nominations include the 1988 Primetime Emmy for both Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries: Jack Lemmon as "John Marshall Slaton", and Outstanding Writing in a Miniseries: Jeffrey Lane (teleplay), Larry McMurty (story). It was also nominated for the 1989 Golden Globe for Best Miniseries and Best Performance by an Actor in a Miniseries: Jack Lemmon, as well as the 1989 Casting Society of America's award, the Artios, for Best Casting for TV Miniseries: Howard Feuer.

Other treatments
In 1921, African-American director Oscar Micheaux directed a silent race film entitled The Gunsaulus Mystery, followed by Murder in Harlem in 1935. An earlier movie version of the case, based on the Ward Greene novel Death in The Deep South but with the names changed, was directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1937 and called They Won't Forget, starring Claude Rains and Lana Turner. An episode of the 1964 TV series Profiles in Courage dramatized Governor John M. Slaton's decision to commute Frank's sentence. The episode starred Walter Matthau as Governor Slaton and Michael Constantine as Tom Watson. In 1997, David Mamet published a book about Leo Frank called The Old Religion. The following year a Broadway musical called Parade, written by the playwright Alfred Uhry, with music composed by Jason Robert Brown was produced. In 2004 the journalist Steve Oney published his history of the Mary Phagan case, entitled And the Dead Shall Rise. The trial and Frank's lynching have also been explored in works of academic history.

New Sources

 * Leonard Dinnerstein. The Leo Frank Case (1987).
 * The Return of the Repressed: Leo Frank Through the Eyes of Oscar Micheaux
 * IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095678/awards?ref_=tt_awd
 * Golden globe website https://www.goldenglobes.com/tv-show/murder-mary-phagan
 * Emmy website https://www.emmys.com/site-search?search_api_views_fulltext=The+murder+of+Mary+phagan&items_per_page=10
 * web film archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100413193019/http://www.filmquarterly.org/issue_5704_right.html
 * documenting the American south https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/littlemary/summary.html