Black Legion

Black Legion (1937) is a potent, gripping melodrama starring a very youthful-looking Humphrey Bogart. The film was timely when it was first shown, a muckraking expose of Fascist anti-immigration groups in the Midwest. Apparently, the film derives from terrorist activities resulting in a celebrated trial in Detroit in 1936. And the movie is relevant today in light of the rhetoric that certain political candidates have used with regard to Hispanic immigration. Bogart is an abrasive, somewhat dull-witted machinist with a nice wife and kid. When a Polish guy is promoted to shop foreman, a job that Bogart’s character covet, he joins the Black Legion, swears a blood-curdling oath of allegiance, and starts night-riding with his hooded comrades, burning down immigrant businesses and flogging foreigners. The logic of the enterprise results in an inexorable expansion of the scope of violence as the Legion swoops down on Bogart’s friends and neighbors to avenge private grievances. Bogart ends up murdering his best friend. At trial, where he has been prepped to perjure himself – the courtroom is full of smirking Black Legionnaires – Bogart finds the courage to tell the truth and all the bad guys, including the hero, get sent to prison for life. The movie is continuously exciting and very skillfully made – the film’s narrative efficiency is staggering; part of the picture’s appeal is the convincing way that a subplot involving a local “bad girl” becomes integral to the film’s political narrative. Fascists, as it turns out, are not so much different from you and I and the film’s melancholy conclusion – a series of close-ups showing the unprepossessing faces of the convicted terrorists intercut with their weeping families is powerfully moving. Bogart’s character gets no reprieve; there are no second chances in this world: he screws up a machine and loses his foreman position; mess up with the wrong associates and you will go to jail forever even though you have a handsome little boy who likes baseball and a beautiful wife. The film’s last shot moves the camera close to her stricken, pale face making the point that even Hollywood glamour is insufficient to some situations. (The disk comes with a commentary track that mostly ignores the many of the peculiar things crying out for explication in the film – the commentators regard the movie as so hopelessly compromised by rewrites and committee decision-making that narrative peculiarities basically arise by accident; even if this is true, it’s not a useful way to explicate a film. Like the Bible, another work by a committee, we must search out the meaning of the narrative as if it were wholly intentional otherwise the text vanishes under a heap of futile footnotes. Some short films provided as bonus material, simulating a 1937 night at the movies – March of Time newsreel, cartoon, and a couple of short subjects – are staggeringly strange and remind us that the past is a truly foreign country.)