Black Legion (film)

Black Legion is a 1937 American melodrama 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 OBrienMoore and Ann Sheridan. It is a fictionalized treatment of the historic Black Legion of the 1930s in Michigan, a white vigilante group. A third of its members lived in Detroit, which had also been a center of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

When passed over for promotion at work in favor of a foreignborn friend, Frank Taylor Humphrey Bogart, a midwestern factory worker, joins the antiimmigrant Black Legion, a secret white vigilante organization portrayed as related to the Ku Klux Klan. Dressed in black robes and hoods, Taylor and the Legion mount a torchlight raid and burn down the friends chicken farm, driving him out of town, so that Taylor can gain the job he believed was his. Soon, however, Taylors recruiting activities with the Legion get in the way of his work, and he is demoted in favor of neighbor Mike Grogan Clifford Soubier. The Legion takes action again, attacking Grogan.Under the continued influence of the Legion, Taylor becomes a brutal racist, and alienates his wife Erin OBrienMoore. He starts drinking heavily and takes up with a loose woman Helen Flint. When his friend Ed Jackson Dick Foran tries to counsel him, a drunken Taylor tells about his Legion activities. Taylor reports the conversation to Cliff, a coworker and fellow member of the Legion, who initiates a false rumor that Jackson is a womanbeater. On the pretext of punishing him for that offense, the Legion kidnaps Jackson, planning to flog him. Jackson tries to escape. As he is running away, Taylor shoots and kills him breaking down afterward with guilt and remorse, he exclaims, I didnt mean to shoot ........

Source: Wikipedia