On Kozlovsky-Golan’s The Death Penalty in American Cinema: “Spare Me!”

Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan’s The Death Penalty in American Cinema is not a total loss, either from a Jewish or cinema studies standpoint. Though making no claim to a predominantly Jewish perspective, the author, herself a Jewish academic at Haifa University, could scarcely avoid touching on representations of capital punishment that deal with pointedly Jewish subjects. The most prominent of these, at least historically, are the Leo Frank and Leopold and Loeb cases; and, indeed, films on these topics are among those receiving the more detailed discussions in the book.

Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, was sentenced to death in 1913 for the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a gentile employee. Unaware that the prosecution had suppressed a confession to the crimes from Jim Conley, a black janitor, the governor, based solely on the shoddy evidence, reduced Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment. Southern whites, however, angered by the commutation, incited by the Ku Klux Klan, and abetted by authorities, lynched Frank in 1915. Three films on the tragic miscarriage of justice were released the year of the lynching. One, The Frank Case, was by a Jewish director, George Roland. The other two, Thou Shalt Not Kill and Leo M. Frank (Showing Life in Jail) and Governor Slaton, expressed director Hal Reid’s “vehement opposition to the death penalty” (10). A year later, no less than D. W. Griffith would adapt elements of the Frank case to the contemporary trial segment in his monumental Intolerance.

Kozlovsky-Golan adds that Reid went on to collaborate with African-American director Oscar Micheaux on his landmark anti–black lynching film Within Our Gates (1920), which she claims was a “joint” effort of the two men that was inspired by the Frank case (13). The first of these intriguing assertions, however, is undermined by Micheaux’s sole writing and directing credit on the film and by Micheaux biographer Patrick McGilligan’s making no mention of Reid’s involvement; the second is trumped by the widely held scholarly view that the film was mainly a rebuttal to Griffith’s racist Civil War epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). She is on firmer ground with regard to the (quite explicit) Frank connection in Micheaux’s The Gunsaulus Mystery (1921), and in believing that Micheaux’s motivation here was to exonerate the black Conley, at Frank’s expense. Her examination of Micheaux’s “unrelenting 20-year-long efforts to vindicate Conley” delves further into Jewish territory, probing the twentieth-century history of Jewish-black relations and questioning, but largely dismissing, an anti-Semitic element to Micheaux’s obsession (14).

The Leopold and Loeb case gets shorter shrift—curiously, and disappointingly, given the several films inspired by it as well, and the arguably even richer vein for analysis it provides on the death penalty and Jewishness. In 1924 two Jewish, gay, upper-crust University of Chicago postgraduate students, Nathan Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, fancying themselves Nietzschean supermen capable of committing the perfect crime, kidnapped and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. Thanks to an impassioned plea from renowned attorney Clarence Darrow, however, the two men received “only” life sentences for the murder (and 99 years for the kidnapping). Rope, a play based more on the murder than the trial, was staged in 1929; performed on BBC television in 1939; and adapted for the screen by Alfred Hitchcock in 1947. A second Hollywood version of the incident, Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion (1959), highlighted the trial and starred Orson Welles as the Darrow-inspired character. Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992), owing to its post–Production Code release, was the first film to identify the murderers’ Jewishness and emphasize their gayness.

As the version that devotes the most attention to the trial, Compulsion duly receives the most in-depth treatment in the book. Two paragraphs, however—one on the trial and one on...