Black Legion

Black Legion (1937)

They Murdered at Midnight!

When a hard-working machinist loses a promotion to a Polish-born worker, he is seduced into joining the secretive Black Legion, which intimidates foreigners through violence.

Date of release
1937-01-30
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (60)
Runtime
1h 23m
Genres
Crime, Drama
Director
Archie Mayo

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 1. Including: National Board of Review: Top Ten Films

Black Legion is a 1937 American crime drama film, directed by Archie Mayo, with a script by Abem Finkel and William Wister Haines based on an original story by producer Robert Lord. The film stars Humphrey Bogart, Dick Foran, Erin O'Brien-Moore and Ann Sheridan. It is a fictionalized treatment of the historic Black Legion of the 1930s in Michigan, a white terrorist group. A third of its members lived in Detroit, which had also been a center of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

Production

Black Legion went into production in late August 1936. Many of the details about the Legion portrayed in the film, such as the initiation oath and the confessions in the trial scenes, were based on known facts about the historic organization. Because United States libel laws had recently been broadened in scope by court rulings, Warner Brothers underplayed some aspects of the group's political activities to avoid legal repercussion.

Location shooting took place in private homes in the Hollywood area, the Providencia Ranch in the Hollywood Hills and the Warner Ranch in Calabasas. Executive producer Hal B. Wallis had wanted Edward G. Robinson to play the lead role, but producer Robert Lord thought Robinson was too foreign looking, and wanted a "distinctly American looking actor to play [the] part."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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