Tonight I watched a very dramatic Humphrey Bogart movie called "Black Legion" (1937). Bogie plays a drill operator working in the machine shop of an unnamed factory. He is well-liked and also a top worker, so when an opening comes up for shop foreman, he expectantly believes the job will be his. When another young man is given the promotion instead, Bogart fumes silently. He has already made promises at home : a new car for his wife, baseball gear for his boy. He was counting his chickens, however, and they didn't hatch. He is forced to come home and tell his wife and son the bad news.
The young man who is given the job as the new foreman is a cut above the average blue collar tradesman. He is shown reading engineering books on his lunch break. He has already invented a cooling system for the drill presses that has saved the company a lot of money in time and equipment.
His name is Joe Dombrowski. He lives on a chicken ranch with his father. They are Polish immigrants trying to make good in the United States, and they are American citizens.
This is where the movie turns, and keeps turning until it gets downright scary.
You see, while Bogie is fuming about the foreman job he thought was his, there are other people who are much more upset than he, about "immigrants taking our jobs". Holy Trumpian Smokes, folks.
Fascism is never far away in America, and in 1937, there were a lot of people who sympathized with Hitler, and more to the point of this movie, with the Ku Klux Klan.
There are a couple of Bogie's co-workers who have openly called out the promotion of Joe Dombrowski for shop foreman. They make fun of his intelligence, as the mooks will do when faced with their own lack of same. See Trump once again. But far more threatening is their hatred of Dombrowski's ethnicity. Humphrey is not by nature a bigot, but he takes note of the bigots who are sticking up for him. Then he hears on the radio a strange program advertising membership in a Nationalist political group, a group that is "standing up for American jobs, and values"!
I am telling you, folks - though this dialogue was written 83 years ago, it could have just as easily been written today. Nothing has changed on the Xenophobia Front.
One of Bogie's factory cronies is a particularly vicious bigot. The focus in this movie is on a general prejudice against "foreigners", but the message is clear : we could be talking about black folks or Jewish people, and the movie came out in 1937 at the height of Hitler's power. So Bogie has this co-worker who sees how upset he is at losing his promotion to Dombroski, and he talks Bogie into joining his secret lodge, a group of violent racists made up of local workers and businessmen. The group is called "The Black Legion" and they are a frightening bunch indeed.
In one of the more blatant scenes in early studio movies, Bogart - after he joins the group - is made to participate in an initiation ritual that differs not much from a Satanic Rite. The Legion members are all decked out in their Klan-style hoods and gowns. Their hoods have a skull & bones on them (Hey! Skull & Bones, anybody?) Bogie is made to swear his oath to the group with a gun pointed to his head, outdoors around a campfire. This is some really weird stuff for a major Warner Brothers release in 1937, I kid you not.
But now that he is sworn in, he can't leave. He will be killed if he tries. The Black Legion are neo-Nazis, and the first victims on their agenda is to be the Dombrowskis and their chicken farm. Bogie gleefully takes part in the violence against this family, and soon he is fully involved in the Legion's evil doings.
Back at home, his loving wife (the stunning early actress Erin O'Brien-Moore) can't understand the sudden changes in his behavior, why he stays out so late and why he snaps at her for no reason.
His best friend (Dick Foran) doesn't get it either. Foran is one of the good guys at the factory who gets along with everyone. He has recently straightened up his own act to stop drinking and break up with his floozy girlfriend so that he can marry his sweetheart neighbor Ann Sheridan (who you would marry, too, if you had the chance). Foran had supported Joe Dombrowski when the mooks of the factory tried to undercut his new position of leadership, and now that he and his family have gone missing, Foran senses something is wrong. He notices the same things about Bogart that the wife has mentioned. Something about Bogie has changed, and it's getting worse.
The nighttime excursions of the Black Legion become regular and increasingly more bold. Now they are going after other factory workers and anyone in town who supports equality. We are shown that there is a financial motive for those who head up the movement, men who never take part in the action (like Trump) but who have the money to build it into a national front, and thus profit from membership dues and the sale of handguns to the members.
I mean.......folks!......here is a movie, in 1937 - 82 years ago! - taking on the f%@#king NRA, perhaps the most evil lobbying group in American history, and in the film they are showing the businessmen at the top of the organisation tallying up their profits from the sale of mandatory handgun purchases to their members.
This is one Hard Core truth telling motion picture, my friends. And made so long ago, but still current and even more so today.
I won't go any further with the plot to avoid spoilers. It does turn into a courtroom drama for the last 10 or 12 minutes, but here I want to harp on script development one more time, just because I love great movies and because the script has so much to do with the success, or failure, of any film.
The running time of "Black Legion" was 83 minutes. In addition to the main plot, there are a few subplots involving Bogie's wife and her allegiance to her husband, and another more developed theme about Dick Foran's involvement with the floozy, who tries to steal him from Ann Sheridan. This subplot is played in intervals to show Foran's turnaround to a wholesome life, and his realization that his friend Humphrey Bogart is in deep trouble. Foran, having recovered his own values, will try to rescue Bogie.
But he is up against some amoral and sociopathic gangsters, real nutjobs, and it will be hard going for him in his attempt to set things right.
Wow. This is some Early Bogie, one of his first dozen roles, and I think it is up there with his best. He has to really emote in many of the critical scenes, rather that just doing his Humphrey Bogart thing, and these are my favorite movies by him, when he shows what a great actor he was, given the chance.
"Black Legion" is an unusually hardcore movie from a Hollywood studio in the Golden Era. I give it Two Gigantic Thumbs Up for it's realism and courage to face the truth.
It's not for the squeamish, but then again it's only 1937, so there's nothing too graphic.
Highest recommendation. See you in church in the morning. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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