The Murder of Mary Phagan
7.6 /10 1 Votes7.6
Genre CrimeDramaHistory Duration Country United States | 7.4/10 IMDb Running time 4h 11m Language English | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Release date January 24, 1988 Episodes 1 Episode 1Season 1 - Jan 24 - 1988, 1 Episode 1, 1 Episode 1Season 1 - Jan 24 - 1988, 1 Episode 1 Cast (Gov. John Slaton), (Hugh Dorsey), (Tom Watson), (Leo Frank), (Sally Slaton), (Lucille Frank) Similar movies Dancer in the Dark , The Secret Life of Words , Gung Ho , The Promised Land , Siddharth , Factory B |
The murder of mary phagan january 26 1988 commercial break 2 edited
The Murder of Mary Phagan, a 1988 two-part American TV miniseries written by Larry McMurtry, produced by George Stevens, Jr., directed by William "Billy" Hale, starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey, made by Orion Pictures Corporation, and distributed by National Broadcasting Company (NBC), is a dramatization of the 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. In addition to Lemmon and Spacey, the film features 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.
Contents
- The murder of mary phagan january 26 1988 commercial break 2 edited
- Honors
- Cast
- Other treatments
- References

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.
Honors
The film won the 1988 Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries.
Cast
Other treatments
An earlier movie version of the case, with the names changed, was directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1937 and called They Won't Forget, starring Claude Rains and Lana Turner.
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.
References
The Murder of Mary Phagan WikipediaThe Murder of Mary Phagan IMDb The Murder of Mary Phagan themoviedb.org