Black Legion (1937)

This is a shocking and horrible story of a most ordinary and honest factory worker who gets bypassed in promotion and can't get over his humiliation. Opportunity brings him into contact with a Ku Klux Klan-like racist secret society, in which he gets caught in a dwindling vicious circle of constantly worse incrimination. The film is a glaring warning, it is over-obvious in its message, but it is well done, it is shockingly realistic, it does convince you that this is how a secret society of that kind works, and you can't get into deeper trouble than getting stuck in such claws. The question here and the worry of the audience is nor however there could be an obligatory happy ending to this mess, the concern is rather obviously the degree of how bad it will end.Humphrey Bogart makes an unforgettable performance though, his anguish in the end is on par with a Shakespeare tragedy performance, and he was here only in the beginning of his career. He is a type of his own, he is always himself in all his films, and yet that character he develops every time into new idiosyncracies - although he is always the same he is always new. And here he is young and fresh and almost even handsome - to begin with.

"Black Legion" is one of the more controversial films from "Warner Bros" and it should have made Humphrey Bogart a star. The film's premise is daring for the times, especially after the American Film Censors had clamped down pretty hard on Hollywood films in general. Bogart plays a factory worker who has had the same job for many years. He is a married man with a son and has an ordinary existence. At the beginning of the film, Bogart has the chance of being promoted to that of shop steward at the factory. However, he is passed over by a young worker who is from an Eastern European background. Angry and resentful, Bogart is coerced by a work colleague into joining a secret society that tries to rid America of all citizens who aren't born and bred Americans. The society is a thinly veiled version of the Klu Klux Klan, as aggressive and violent means are employed. Before long, Bogart is in over his head and it's not long before tragedy occurs. This is the kind of film that reflects the old fashioned kind of Republican politics and is disturbing because of that. The cast of talented actors do full justice to some excellent dialogue. The violence is quite stark and unflinching. I wouldn't be surprised if "Black Legion" ran into Censorship trouble. The film turns into a human interest story about how American society is reflected and portrayed via the politics from the secret society. Humphrey Bogart does very well in the leading role. If only "Warner Bros" had found more films like the above for him, Bogart wouldn't have been stuck in a rut the way he was until 1941. The climax is what you would expect from a film like this but it rounds up a fine film.

Okay, so Bogie is great at everything, but what is he absolutely the best at? Here, we have a story about a group called THE BLACK LEGION, but clearly implied is that it is the KU KLUX KLAN.It is a well written account about how a very ordinary man is swept up into the group. We see hordes of men clinging to the safety of the group. When in the lynch mob, they become different.We see the man's life torn apart, but also the lives of those around him who just want to make their lives, and the lives of others a better place.We are given lots of views of what is taking place in this drama. The drama is full of action, too. It isn't the Macbeth like horror, but the more realistic, every day horror that is depicted, and how it gets out of hand.And that brings us to what Bogie does best. Like the Sierra Madre and other Bogie classics, he is the absolute best at giving us the villain with insecurities, the "realistic" villain, who we see fighting within himself. Much of this is clever writing, also. But it's hard not to think much of it is the genius of Bogart.Obivously a top film, and still as entertaining and interesting today as it was then.

Fine Warners muckraking, with Bogie in an atypical good-average-Joe-gone-wrong role, as an assembly line worker in a typical middle American town who is passed over for a promotion and grows quickly to resent the smart Polish guy who got the job. This sends him into a downward spiral of despising the foreign-born, developing a narrow ideology of what constitutes a true American, and joining a frightening, Klan-like hate group to harass and scare off the immigrants. (No black people in this 1930s Anytown, but you can bet if there were, he'd be after them, too.) Bogie has to play a wide range of emotions, even breaking down and sobbing and clinging to his wife's apron strings, and while it takes a while to get used to him in this regular-guy persona, he's very good. It's a plausible story, still relevant in these days of teabaggers and Palinistas, and Bogie is ably supported by Dick Foran (as his more conscientious best friend), Erin O'Brien Moore (as his sad, increasingly desperate wife), and a young Ann Sheridan (whose character seems a bit too calm and forgiving in the final reels, considering what's been done to her loved ones). Daringly, it doesn't have a happy ending, and while there's a hokey fadeout with a judge intoning the moral of the story in one long take (as if we didn't get it already), it's a genuinely scary it-can-happen-here movie.