Some Hollywood mogul once said, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union." I forget the mogul's name and I'm too lazy to look it up but I'm sure it wasn't one of the Warner brothers. They didn't make family-friendly gems like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. They ground out message movies by the score during the Great Depression and during and after World War II. They were fast and artless.
In this one, a little more emphatic than most, Humphrey Bogart is a happily married factory worker. He's good at his job. Everyone likes him. And when there is an opening for a new foreman, it's assumed that he'll get the promotion. He doesn't get it. "Dombrowski" gets it.
Dombrowski is an interesting character. Played by the handsome and gay Henry Brandon -- who went on to play Scar in "The Searchers" -- he's a genuinely nice guy too. When the guys are shooting the breeze about Bogart's coming promotion, Brandon says, "He'll make a great foreman." Brandon gets the job because he puts a little more into his work. He's going to night school and spends his evenings studying instead of listening to radio thrillers or drinking beer with the rest of the fellas. He lives on a chicken farm with his immigrant Pop. His ethnicity is never mentioned.
I'm going to have to skim over the slightly intricate plot. It's enough to say that Bogart becomes embittered, joins an organization called The Black Legion that looks a lot like the KKK, and winds up murdering Dick Foran, his best friend, the son of an Irish immigrant who subscribes to "da Roman hierarchy". The Legionnaires are all arrested and sent off to spend their lives in the slams, Bogart included.
Seeing it now, in our current political climate, one of its most impressive elements is the argument presented by the leaders of The Black Legion. The immigrants are taking over. They're introducing alien ideologies, stealing American jobs, undermining the welfare of good Americans. The air was filled with bumper sticker slogans, as it is now. The hatred is incandescent.
Happily, no explanation of the Legion or its members' motives is offered. "Happily" because there really isn't any. Social scientists have a variety of theories, ranging from the simple to the complex, but nobody really knows why these outbreaks of collective paranoia and aggression take place -- and they DO take place more or less regularly.
In America, prohibition (1919 - 1933) was in part an expression of anger against the Germans who were our foes in World War I and against the second wave of immigrants from central and southern Europe, for whom alcohol was not only not a sin but a ritualized part of both everyday and spiritual life. And who ran the breweries? Schlitz, Blatz, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Coors, Budweiser, Schaefer, Ruppert, Hamm. Notice anything about that list? We couldn't send them back but we could make 'em suffer.
As the protagonist, Bogart follows Archie Mayo's direction, hits his marks, and says his lines. So does everyone else. Bogart's performance seems the least rushed, the least perfunctory, and Ann Sheridan's stands out as well. The writing doesn't sparkle but the message is clear and the story gripping, and that's enough to hold the film together. I don't know that the message will get through though. Most of us may sit back and shake our heads at how irrational the good folks were, way back there in 1937. It's a good thing we're so much more sophisticated, so much more thoughtful, today.
In this one, a little more emphatic than most, Humphrey Bogart is a happily married factory worker. He's good at his job. Everyone likes him. And when there is an opening for a new foreman, it's assumed that he'll get the promotion. He doesn't get it. "Dombrowski" gets it.
Dombrowski is an interesting character. Played by the handsome and gay Henry Brandon -- who went on to play Scar in "The Searchers" -- he's a genuinely nice guy too. When the guys are shooting the breeze about Bogart's coming promotion, Brandon says, "He'll make a great foreman." Brandon gets the job because he puts a little more into his work. He's going to night school and spends his evenings studying instead of listening to radio thrillers or drinking beer with the rest of the fellas. He lives on a chicken farm with his immigrant Pop. His ethnicity is never mentioned.
I'm going to have to skim over the slightly intricate plot. It's enough to say that Bogart becomes embittered, joins an organization called The Black Legion that looks a lot like the KKK, and winds up murdering Dick Foran, his best friend, the son of an Irish immigrant who subscribes to "da Roman hierarchy". The Legionnaires are all arrested and sent off to spend their lives in the slams, Bogart included.
Seeing it now, in our current political climate, one of its most impressive elements is the argument presented by the leaders of The Black Legion. The immigrants are taking over. They're introducing alien ideologies, stealing American jobs, undermining the welfare of good Americans. The air was filled with bumper sticker slogans, as it is now. The hatred is incandescent.
Happily, no explanation of the Legion or its members' motives is offered. "Happily" because there really isn't any. Social scientists have a variety of theories, ranging from the simple to the complex, but nobody really knows why these outbreaks of collective paranoia and aggression take place -- and they DO take place more or less regularly.
In America, prohibition (1919 - 1933) was in part an expression of anger against the Germans who were our foes in World War I and against the second wave of immigrants from central and southern Europe, for whom alcohol was not only not a sin but a ritualized part of both everyday and spiritual life. And who ran the breweries? Schlitz, Blatz, Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Coors, Budweiser, Schaefer, Ruppert, Hamm. Notice anything about that list? We couldn't send them back but we could make 'em suffer.
As the protagonist, Bogart follows Archie Mayo's direction, hits his marks, and says his lines. So does everyone else. Bogart's performance seems the least rushed, the least perfunctory, and Ann Sheridan's stands out as well. The writing doesn't sparkle but the message is clear and the story gripping, and that's enough to hold the film together. I don't know that the message will get through though. Most of us may sit back and shake our heads at how irrational the good folks were, way back there in 1937. It's a good thing we're so much more sophisticated, so much more thoughtful, today.