Lost Boundaries (Louis DeRochemont Associates, RD-DR Productions, Film Classics, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 5) my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating if uneven film on Turner Classic Movies: Lost Boundaries, the (mostly) true story of a light-skinned African-American doctor who “passed” for white, along with his equally light-skinned African-American wife, for two decades in a small New England town until he was “outed” when he applied to serve as a Navy doctor during World War II and Naval Intelligence discovered he’d joined a “Negro” fraternity in medical school and canceled his officer’s commission. Lost Boundaries was made in 1949 as an independent production by producer Louis de Rochemont and director Alfred Werker, which suggests it was a 20th Century-Fox production in exile. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, it was actually developed at MGM, but it was canceled at the last minute (ironically, MGM at the time was making their own movie about anti-Black prejudice, Intruder in the Dust, which I haven’t seen in decades but I remember as quite good). Lost Boundaries was based on an article by William H. White in the Reader’s Digest in 1947 about the real-life couple, Dr. Albert C. Johnston and his wife Thyra, who settled first in Gorham, New Hampshire and then in the neighboring town of Keene (called “Keenham” in the film) and lived and practiced there for 20 years until they were finally “outed” as Black. The film project went through the usual meat grinder, with a plethora of writers – Charles Palmer (“adaptation”), Eugene Ling and Virginia Shaler (screenplay), and Ormonde de Kay, Jr. and Maxime Furlaud (additional dialogue). For the film the names of the central characters were changed to “Dr. Scott Mason Carter” (Mel Ferrer) and his wife “Marcia” (Beatrice Pearson), and the story actually tracks pretty closely to Dr. and Mrs. Johnston’s real lives until Dr. Carter graduates from medical school and, unable to find a Black hospital in which he can serve his internship (in the film he gets thrown out of an internship at a Black hospital in Georgia when he’s told that a new policy has been enacted saying the internship can only go to a Southerner), does it in a white hospital in New England. He figures that for less than a year he can “pass” as white, finish his internship and then work as an openly Black doctor in hospitals serving the Black community.

But fate throws him a curveball; while visiting New Hampshire he gets an emergency call to rescue and revive someone who’s just been taken seriously ill off the coast. Dr. Carter’s patient turns out to be a doctor himself, Walter Brackett (Morton Stevens), who’s been looking for a doctor to take over his late father’s practice in Keenham. After Dr. Carter saves the younger Brackett’s life, he virtually demands that Dr. Carter remain in Keenham and take over his late father’s practice, which he does. Dr. Carter and Marcia have already had a child, a son they named Charles Howard Carter (played as a teenager by Richard Hylton) after Dr. Carter’s (Black) teacher in medical school (Emory Richardson). As they’re living in their white identities in Keenham, the Carters have another child, daughter Shelly (Susan Douglas), and both Howard and Shelly grow up and reach their teen years without any idea that they and their parents are really Black. In fact, Shelly is so white-identified she’s picked up the racist prejudices of the townspeople, and in one scene after her brother Howard announces he’s going to bring his (visibly) Black friend Arthur “Art” Cooper (William Greaves, a fine young Black actor and singer – he does one number, “Guess I’m Through with Love,” in a quite good Billy Eckstine-esque baritone), after Shelly’s white boyfriend Andy (Carleton Carpenter in his first film) does a song of his own – she protests that the neighbors will think ill of them when they have a “coon” over as a house guest. Dr. Carter is shocked to hear his daughter use a racist epithet, and he chews her out and forbids her to say it again but still doesn’t explain why. When the truth about their racial heritage comes out, the two Carter children are freaked out – especially Howard, who runs away from home, ends up in Harlem and gets arrested by New York police (including a Black detective, “Dixie” Thompson, played by Canada Lee) for trying to break up a knife fight between two young Black men living in the building where he’s rented an apartment. It’s only when they receive word of their son’s arrest that the Carters finally find out where he is.

The film ends with a service at the local Episcopal church where the Rev. John Taylor (played by a real minister, Rev. Robert A. Dunn) preaches a sermon about tolerance, equality and how all of us are the same in God’s eyes. Lost Boundaries is a quite impressive film even though there are times it seems to be trying too hard, and it was criticized at the time for having all the light-skinned “Black” characters played by white actors. Fredi Washington, who’d achieved a brief flash-in-the-pan taste of stardom as Peola, the young Black girl “passing” for white in the 1934 film Imitation of Life, protested that De Rochemont should have looked for genuine light-skinned Black actors to play the four Carters instead of having white people do it. (Ironically, when Imitation of Life was remade in 1959, a white actress, Susan Kohner, played Washington’s old role.) It’s likely that one reason De Rochemont cast the film the way he did was to avoid having any hint of miscegenation on screen, though that didn’t stop the cities of Atlanta, Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee from banning the film in their communities. Ironically, Lost Boundaries ends with an announcement by the reverend preaching the anti-racist sermon that the U.S. Navy has just eliminated the requirement that its officers must be white; the film was actually released one year after President Harry Truman issued his famous and courageous executive order banning all racial discrimination in the U.S. military. If only Bill Clinton had had that same kind of courage in 1993 and delivered on his promise to end military discrimination against Queers instead of bringing on the horrors of “don’t ask, don’t tell”!