The Scar of Shame (Colored Players Film Corporation, Sack Amusement Enterprises, 1927, released 1929)

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

Last night (Sunday, December 1) Turner Classic Movies showed a quite haunting and surprisingly good if uneven film called The Scar of Shame, made in 1927 (but not released until 1929) for the sadly short-lived Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This enterprise was founded by two unlikely partners, Black vaudevillian and minstrel Sherman “Uncle Dud” Dudley and white theatre owner David Starkman. Starkman’s theatre was located in a predominantly Black neighborhood and he wanted to give his audiences films that more accurately reflected the Black experience than the productions of white Hollywood, which all too often fell back on racist stereotypes in their depictions of Blacks. The company made four films: A Prince of His Race (1926), a revamping of the old stage hit Ten Nights in a Barroom with an all-Black cast (1926), Children of Fate (1927) and this one. Alas, only Ten Nights in a Barroom and The Scar of Shame survive, though at least The Scar of Shame, after decades during which it was thought to be lost, turned up in a complete nitrate print with the original credits and intertitles. Like a lot of other independent film companies, Colored Players Film Corporation went under when sound came in and they couldn’t afford the vastly more expensive equipment needed to make talkies. The Scar of Shame was both written and directed by whites: David Starkman wrote the script and the director and cinematographer, Frank Perugini and Al Liguori, were both Italian-Americans. Black film historian Donald Bogle has called The Scar of Shame the best independent silent film ever made by African-Americans – which seems to me damned unfair to Oscar Micheaux, the pioneering Black filmmaker. I’ve seen two of Micheaux’s silents, Within Our Gates (1920) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html) and Body and Soul (1925) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/body-and-soul-micheaux-book-and-film.html), and both of them I liked considerably better than The Scar of Shame even though The Scar of Shame is quite an estimable film.

It starts out in the Philadelphia boarding house of Mrs. Lucretia Green (Ann Kennedy, who doesn’t look particularly Black) with an argument between two of her roomers, serious (i.e., classical) Black composer Alvin Hillyard (Harry Henderson) and scapegrace bad guy Eddie Blake (Norman Johnstone). The two later fight over the affections of Louise Howard (Lucia Lynn Moses, a quite remarkable actress whose only film this was, though afterwards she had a long career as a stage actress), who’s rescued by Alvin from the clutches of her abusive father, “Spike” (William E. Pettus). Though Alvin’s mother back home (wherever he’s from) has another woman, Helen Smith, picked out for him to marry, he marries Louise not because he’s in love with her but to save her from that nasty man who sired her. Alvin doesn’t want Louise to meet his mother (whom we never see on screen) because she’ll resent the fact that he married below his “caste” – the Indian-derived word is actually used in the intertitles – while Eddie plans to kidnap her and install her as the star attraction in a cabaret/casino, where she’ll be a B-girl. Ernest gets “Spike” to help him with the kidnapping by plying him with bad Prohibition booze (“Spike” is an alcoholic) and hiring him as his lookout. He lures Alvin out of the rooming house by sending him a fake telegram that his mother is deathly ill, and once he’s gone he swoops in. In the film’s best scene, out of resentment that Alvin has abandoned her and doesn’t think she’s good enough for his family, Louise tears up his photo of his mother and also their marriage license, and takes off her wedding ring. Alvin learns from his mom’s Black butler that she’s perfectly all right, and he races back to Philadelphia – only when he arrives at his and Louise’s home, Eddie is already there. The two men confront each other and draw guns (one wonders what a nice guy like Alvin was doing going around with a gun), and Louise ends up wounded with the titular “scar of shame,” a scar across her face that the intertitles tell us ruined her natural beauty (though she looks about the same pre- and post-wounding).

Alvin is arrested and goes to prison for assault, though he escapes by sawing through the bars of his cell (relatively easily) and flees to another city, where he establishes himself as music teacher “Arthur Jones.” He also falls genuinely in love with one of his students, Alice Hathaway (Pearl McCormack), which gets complicated not only because he’s still legally married to Louise but because she’s the daughter of local attorney, fixer and all-around big shot Ralph Hathaway (Laurence Chenault). Among other projects, Ralph pulls strings with the local politicians to make sure Eddie (ya remember Eddie?) is allowed to operate the Lido Club cabaret and casino openly. Sure enough, we get a glimpse of the Lido Club, a riotous establishment with a resident jazz band led by Sid Stratton – we know it’s a jazz band because we get an inset close-up of one of its members playing a saxophone, and we’re obviously supposed to get the point that the “bad” characters listen to jazz while the “good” ones listen to the sort of lace-curtain songs Alvin is presumably composing. I was particularly interested in the Lido Club scenes because the imdb.com page on this film listed the great Black stage actor Charles Gilpin as playing one of the gamblers. Gilpin created the lead role of Brutus Jones in Eugene O’Neill’s play The Emperor Jones in 1920 and played it successfully both on Broadway and on tour until 1925, when he and O’Neill had a falling-out over O’Neill’s use of the “N-word” in the play. Gilpin wanted O’Neill to rewrite the script to take it out, and O’Neill insisted that as part of his artistic intent, it had to stay in. So O’Neill replaced Gilpin in the role with Paul Robeson, who for all his vaunted Left-wing politics wasn’t as persnickety about the “N-word” as Gilpin had been. Judging from the on-line photos of Gilpin I’ve seen, he was almost certainly the big heavy-set man, cigar in his mouth, at the far left of a sequence showing a poker game at the Lido Club.

The club itself is surprising because it shows both men and women gambling, albeit at separate tables, and Eddie is quite obviously cheating at the poker games, using Louise to spy on the other players (she can see what cards they’re holding with the mirror in her compact). Louise confronts Alvin when he comes to the club and demands that he move in with her and treat her as his wife, but when he refuses she writes a series of notes to the other principals (this part of the film anticipates the current Lifetime movies in which much of the exposition is done by showing the characters’ text messages to each other on screen) explaining that a) it was Eddie, not Alvin, who fired the shot that wounded her, and therefore Alvin should be legally exonerated; b) she realizes Alvin never really loved her and married her only to get her away from that creep of a father; and c) she doesn’t want to stand in the way of Alvin’s happiness with Alice. Then she takes poison and kills herself. Eddie, the rotter he is, tears up the letter Louise wrote him (there are a lot of scenes in this movie that involve the tearing up of documents), but enough of her message seeps through that Alvin and Alice are altar-bound at the end and Alvin is legally exonerated and paired with a woman who will pass muster with his overly class-conscious mother. There are long titles at both the beginning and the end that state that Louise was a basically good woman, but because of the lousy environment she grew up in she was doomed to live a life of shame and not develop her better qualities.

The Scar of Shame is basically a good movie, but there are problems with it. Not only does it depict the Black community as incredibly class-conscious (frankly, through most of the film I was rooting for Alvin and Louise to get together as a couple, make their marriage work, and tell Alvin’s snobby mom to go to hell), it also follows the usual iconography of “race” movies that reflected the bizarre internal racism within the African-American community. The “good” characters are all relatively light-skinned; the darker ones are relegated to villains. Quite a few Black songs of the period divide the African-American world into “yellow,” “brown” and “black,” with the so-called “high yellows” – Blacks who looked almost white and frequently “passed” – depicted as unusually dangerous and amoral, though the “race” filmmakers generally went the other way and presented the lighter-skinned characters as good and the darker-skinned ones as evil. Frank Perugini’s direction is uneven; there are some quite striking visual effects, including the abstract shot of wedding bells as Alvin and Louise get married and some proto-noir shots of Alvin in his prison cell as he gets ready to escape, but there are also long tableau shots with the camera seemingly miles away from the actors and suddenly The Scar of Shame looks like a film from 1915 instead of 1927.

At least Perugini managed to get good performances from his actors; Lucia Lynn Moses in particular is such a striking visual presence it seems amazing that she never made another movie. But he was not a state-of-the-art silent director the way Oscar Micheaux was, and all too much of The Scar of Shame reflects the preachiness that afflicted Micheaux’s films as well (especially once sound came in and Micheaux’s characters started actually saying the long-winded messages of racial uplift he had previously put into intertitles) without Micheaux’s compensating vitality as a filmmaker. Also, at least two of the actors in The Scar of Shame, Harry Henderson and Laurence Chenault, also worked for Micheaux. The Scar of Shame remains a fascinating curio, and it’s nice to know that by 1927 there was enough of a middle class, and even an upper class, in the Black community they could reproduce some of the same insane social snobbery that powered white stories like Stella Dallas. But while there are strong moments of power and dramatic honesty in it, it’s not that great a movie and certainly is not in the same league as Micheaux’s Within Our Gates or Body and Soul.