Black Legion

While the claws of nationalism and totalitarianism grabbed hold of Europe in the years leading up to World War II, Hollywood produced a series of films warning of the dangers of fascistic forces lurking even in America’s dark corners. Spun off from the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion was a loosely connected network of white vigilante groups terrorizing primarily foreign workers in the Midwest, and Archie Mayo’s Black Legion is a fictionalized account of the real-life kidnapping and murder of a Works Progress Administration organizer in Detroit. A baby-faced Humphrey Bogart plays the angry, confused Frank Taylor, a manufacturing worker whose expected promotion to shop foreman is given to Polish immigrant Joe Dombrowski (Henry Brandon) instead. Sensing Taylor’s resentment (“You want to protect your home and family, don’t you?”), co-worker Cliff Moore (Joe Sawyer) recruits him to join the secret Black Legion to whom Taylor immediately takes a blood oath: he’ll be murdered (and in hell) if he ever speaks about the group or its activities. Taylor will soon alienate everyone in his life, including wife Ruth (Erin O’Brien-Moore) and best friends Ed and Betty Jackson (Dick Foran, Ann Sheridan), ultimately faced with a tragic choice between fealty and redemption. Mayo establishes the blue-collar Depression-era milieu quite effectively (dad and son sit inches from the radio when their favorite show comes on; for church supper, the ladies prepare fruit cocktail, tomato soup, and fried chicken). Like Fritz Lang’s Fury a year earlier, Black Legion is a dark film depicting society as threatening and brutal, laying the foundation for evil to become more personalized in the noir to come.