This review was requested by Brian Kapustik. Many thanks to Brian for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
Writers: Abem Finkel, William Wister Haines, Robert Lord
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Dick Foran, Erin O'Brien-Moore, Ann Sheridan, Helen Flint, Dickie Jones, Henry Brandon
Runtime: 83 mins.
1937
After an ominous credit sequence buffeted by illustrations of sinister hooded figures, Black Legion settles us into the day to day life of factory worker Frank Taylor (Humphrey Bogart). We meet his wife (Erin O'Brien-Moore) and child (the surprisingly endearing Dickie Jones), his coworker and neighbor Ed (Dick Foran), Ed's prospective wife Betty (Ann Sheridan), and the floozy who is trying to steal him away from her, Pearl Danvers (Helen Flint). The opening act is lulling. We are shepherded into Frank's comfortable domestic life, the friendly community at the machine shop, and the prospect of job advancement that keeps him coming into work excited day after day.
Frank's certainty of promotion is shattered when the foreman job goes to Polish engineering whiz Joe Dombrowski (Henry Brandon). That night, crestfallen, Frank tunes into the radio with sunken eyes. He listens to a charismatic voice rabble-rousing about foreign-born immigrants invading America, stealing jobs, and threatening real Americans' way of life...
This is the first captivating scene of the film. Frank's entitlement has festered into wounded pride, shattering the idyllic domestic space. The abrupt internalization of this radio propaganda would play as corny if it weren't so plausible and well-acted.
And so we have a morality tale on our hands. Frank gets involved with a local ultra-conservative KKK spinoff called the Black Legion, and their first act together is to burn down the house of his Polish rival and drive him and his father out of town. The better part of a century later, it's surreal seeing how little America's racist rhetoric has changed, even as the targets of that rhetoric have shifted. The verbal and physical acts of racialized violence carried out against Polish and Irish "foreigners" here are no different than those targeted at Latinx or Middle Eastern "foreigners" today.
One of Black Legion's great strengths is showing the sociocultural contributions to Frank's terrorism. Frank is not a raving genocidal maniac from the get go, but we do see how white supremacy has planted the potential for that violence in him, and how racist propaganda activates it. There's an additional thematic layer connecting Frank's racism with his capitalist indoctrination: the enjoyment of purchasing power. When Frank believes he will get the promotion, he fantasizes about buying a car, a vacuum cleaner, a new baseball bat for his family. Once indoctrinated into the Legion, the organization redirects that potential enjoyment towards purchasing equipment (uniform, revolver, etc.). To further connect the dots between buying and bigotry, we learn in one brief insert that the Black Legion is a national moneymaking scheme run by a couple of capitalist hucksters.
Frank's capitalism and his racism feed each other until he robs himself of everything he has. The film diligently portrays the contradictions at the heart of human behavior, building to a climactic example. (spoilers for the rest of the paragraph) Frank's Irish friend Ed finds out about the Black Legion, and Frank has the group kidnap him because he is afraid Ed will go to the police. When Ed tries to escape into the woods, it is the behooded Frank himself who shoots him in the back. Why? He clearly didn't want Ed to come to any harm, yet he pulls the trigger because of the sway of the mask. Radical movements and ideologies control bodies by enabling taboo enjoyment-- the mask is a poison to the soul.
Bogart's performance beautifully navigates this complex terrain. We see here someone who is not yet a Hollywood megastar but is clearly well on his way. From the quiet intensity with which he listens to that radio program, to the faulty bravado he coasts on at work, to the lost and confused look in his eyes after he commits his final act of violence, Bogart's performance is the adhesive that unites these thematic threads. I am accustomed to portrayals of right wing nutcases onscreen, but this is a rarity: an examination of how a hapless man in a vulnerable state can be made into an extremist weapon.
In some ways, Bogart's performance may be too sympathetic. We are left with lingering questions about the movie's project-- should we be using the power of cinema to identify with a hate-driven man who joined a KKK offshoot to ruin lives? Does identifying with Frank allow us to confront our systemic racism, or does it excuse us from such examination? This may be one more contradiction that the film cannot resolve.
The ambiguity of Frank would have been more powerful had the film ended closer to the climactic moment of violence; instead, the final act drags us through a bland courtroom drama. Frank must decide whether to risk harm to his family by exposing the Black Legion, which leads directly into a final moralizing sermon from the judge. It's kind of a dud, seemingly tacked on so the movie can cover its ass about criticizing America too hard. Institutionalized racism and violence are in the bloodstream of America itself, but the heroic ruling of the justice system obscures this by pinning everybody's woes on the actions of a handful of bigots and crony capitalists.
Perhaps the courtroom drama was included out of historical obligation, since this film is a fictionalized treatment of a very real event. Even then, the ending is too feel-good to fit properly with the acerbic precision of everything that precedes it. Thankfully, one sour note at the end doesn't detract from its crisp and intoxicating power. Black Legion avoids the usual pitfalls of the Message Movie by crafting a thoughtful web of social forces that devastate our anti-hero in a psychologically complex way. Whether or not you end up with any grace in your heart for Frank, the real antagonist of the film is the white supremacist system of money, clout, and power that raised him and subsequently seduced him.
4 / 5 BLOBS
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