THE SCAR OF SHAME (1929)

Final release from the short-lived Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia.  Not as advertised ‘the first All-Colored Talking Picture’ (were sound elements added on?), but a ‘lost’ silent reclaimed by the Library of Congress.  But if the ‘Players’ were indeed All-Colored, behind the camera things were almost certainly All-White.  Including director Frank Peregini & Austrian-born scripter David Starkman.  An important distinction since the film’s main interest now lies not in story or technique, but in how it exposes poisonous attitudes within the Black community.  Accurate or hyped up for commercial appeal?  Colored Players’ regular leading man Harry Henderson is a rising Black musician living in a well-run boarding house who impulsively marries abused neighbor Ann Kennedy (in her only role), but refuses to let his well-bred mother meet the new wife as she’s ‘not from their caste.’   What does that mean?  Class?  Education?  Social set?  Family background?  Complexion?  With pride wounded by this slight (and physically wounded by a miss-aimed gun fired by her now jailed husband!), Kennedy falls into the orbit of another boarding house guest, a con-man with an immoral proposition to get a private gambling club up & running.  Meanwhile, the ‘ex’ has escaped from prison and is soon engaged to a proper young woman he can show to Mom.  Wouldn’t you know it, the new girl’s father is a regular at the very gambling club where the still married wife of his putative son-in-law works the customers.  Oh, what a tangled web . . .   Technically, this 1929 film (some sources list 1927), might have been made in the early ‘20s, not a pan, scan or tracking shot in sight.  And even a tight budget doesn’t explain the need for a series of long letters to wrap everything up.  But decent enough acting and those prejudicial attitudes on class and ‘caste’ hold more than enough interest to carry the film along.  Mostly an historic curiosity, but a most curious one.

READ ALL ABOUT IT:  Donald Bogle’s TOMS, COONS, MULATTOES, MAMMIES, AND BUCKS, long the go-to tome for Black American Cinema, has felt inadequate to its subject for more than 50 years.  Anything better out there?