|
Fascism is a weak void insidiously filled, the homegrown version is observed with perhaps an eye toward the European situation. The factory machinist is an ordinary family man, dreaming of buying a new car and bitter at having been passed over for promotion, Humphrey Bogart movingly bewildered before the tough-guy iconography. "Sure you're rooting for the right guy?" The studious Pole (Henry Brandon) is made foreman in his place, the feller on the radio raging about "hordes of grasping, pushing foreigners" starts making a lot of sense. A pharmacy fronts for the secret meeting place, the bully from work (Joe Sawyer) is there for the initiation ritual, cumbersome pledges at gunpoint followed by "the doggonest uniform you ever laid eyes on." Skulls and crossbones on sheets and hoods, a new revolver for posing before a mirror, mere lodge reunions as far as the wife (Erin O'Brien-Moore) needs to know. "Are we in for another reign of terror by a new Ku Klux Klan?" Depredations of prejudice, a stark tract assembled by Archie Mayo and energized by an unbilled Michael Curtiz. Burnings and whippings, rampaging bigots on the ground and their fleecing organizers up above, hate being after all one more business in an exploitation cycle. ("Pure one-hundred percent patriotism," assures the racketeer peddling overpriced regalia to venomous clods.) Blood on the hands breaks the spell and scatters the rats, "they better change the name of your outfit from the Black Legion to the Yellow Legion." Ray in In a Lonely Place remembers the ending, Bogart the shamed man of violence in the gaze of his alarmed woman. With Dick Foran, Ann Sheridan, Helen Flint, Clifford Soubier, Alonzo Price, Paul Harvey, Dickie Jones, Samuel S. Hinds, Addison Richards, Eddie Acuff, John Litel, Charles Halton, and Robert Barrat. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |