Review – Black Legion

Humphrey Bogart takes on the Klan. Or to be more precise, his character joins a Klan-like organization in this ahead-of-its-time anti-racism piece from 1937. Bogart plays a machine shop worker who gets passed over for a promotion, which sends him into a hate spiral directed at the ethnically-different guy who got the job. The hate mongering is cartoonish, not quite Reefer Madness bad but in the same ballpark. Still, it’s fun to see such a pedantic cautionary tale told about the loathsome likes of pointy-headed bigots. Mildly amusing