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.

Plot

Frank Taylor, a Midwestern factory worker, expects to get promoted. Instead, he is passed over in favor of a young, hard-working Polish immigrant. Taylor joins the Black Legion, a secret hate group. Dressed in black hood and robes, Taylor and the Legion go on a torchlight raid, driving the Pole and his family from their town. Taylor then gets the promotion, and all seems well. But one day, while Frank uses a bathroom break recruiting new members for the Legion, an industrial accident results, costing the company an expensive machine. Taylor is held responsible. He is demoted in favor of an Irish co-worker, Mike Grogan. That night, the Black Legion abducts Grogan and ties him to a tree. He is then tortured.

Awards