The Scar of Shame
Brief Synopsis
Cast & Crew
Frank Perugini
Harry Henderson
Norman Johnstone
Ann Kennedy
Lucia Lynn Moses
William E. Pettus
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
One afternoon at Mrs. Lucretia Green's high class boardinghouse, Alvin Hillyard, a struggling young composer, witnesses a drunken man abusing a young woman in the tenement yard next door. He climbs out the window and saves the girl, Louise Howard, then carries her to the boardinghouse, where Mrs. Green comforts her. Mrs. Green offers Louise a room in exchange for helping around the house, hoping to keep her safe from her violent, drunkard stepfather Spike. Meanwhile, Eddie Blake, a saloon owner and another one of Mrs. Green's boarders, encourages Spike to drink and then tries to drag Louise back to her father as he wants to hire the girl, to whom he is attracted, as an entertainer in his seedy club. Alvin once again intervenes, and Mrs. Green tells Eddie to pack his bags while Alvin vows to teach the lout how to have respect for "our" women. Later, at a saloon, Spike and Eddie discuss Louise, and Spike tells the ruffian to leave the girl alone, blaming his own violence on the alcohol that Eddie has given him. Eddie proceeds to push alcohol on the susceptible Spike, and after he has become thoroughly inebriated, he goes to Louise's room and tries to grab her. Alvin rescues Louise once again and then decides that he will marry her so that she will finally be safe. Three months later, Spike, in a state of alcohol withdrawal, begs Eddie for a drink, and Eddie says he will serve him only if he helps kidnap Louise and set up a cabaret in another town, where with her looks and his brains they will make a killing. The pair devises a scheme which involves sending a fake telegram calling Alvin away to his sick mother's bedside. As Alvin packs to leave, Louise offers to accompany him, but Alvin confesses that he has never told his class-conscious mother about their marriage. Alvin leaves as Spike watches the house, and Louise, distraught, ruins a photo of Alvin's mother and then discovers and tears up letters in which the matron mentions her hopes that Alvin will marry a young woman of their own class. Her final acts of defiance are to remove her wedding ring and tear up her marriage license. Although Spike has tried to dissuade him, Eddie enters Louise's room and then tells her to join him in a business deal in another town, a proposition to which Louise agrees, provided their relationship remains strictly business. Alvin discovers the trick played upon him once he arrives at his mother's home and, having dropped his house key, breaks into his and Louise's room through a window and pulls a gun on the pair. The two men fire their guns, and when the police arrive, they find Louise unconscious and wounded. Alvin is convicted of assault based on Louise's testimony, and the girl is left with a disfiguring scar on her neck. Later, Alvin escapes from prison and becomes a successful music teacher under the name "Arthur Jones" in the same city where Louise and Eddie have set up a chic gambling club, the Club Lido. Alvin begins to fall in love with his star music pupil, Alice Hathaway, but cannot declare his feelings because of his past. One day, her father, Ralph Hathaway, a wealthy lawyer, receives a call from Louise inviting him to come to a "whoopie" party at the club, of which Hathaway is the sponsor and protector. When a letter is left for Hathaway, Alice, now engaged to Alvin, asks her fiancé to bring it down to the club, where much to his shock, he is introduced to Louise. Louise blackmails Alvin into dancing with her in front of Hathaway, and then later into coming to visit her at her home. When he arrives, she tries to seduce him, then confesses that she has always loved him. He throws her down and leaves, and, distraught and hopeless, Louise writes a letter and asks her maid to deliver it to Hathaway. She begs God's forgiveness and drinks poison, and when her maid tries to revive her, she begs her to simply deliver the letter. The maid calls Hathaway to come to Louise's side, and before he arrives, Eddie enters the room and finds a letter informing him that she finally plans to clear Alvin's good name. Hathaway arrives, reads his letter, and exclaims in sorrow that his people have much to learn. In the meantime, Alvin, having confessed all to Alice, tries to comfort her, but Hathaway arrives bearing the truth conveyed in Louise's letter: that Eddie had actually shot Louise, who is now dead, and that Alvin is innocent. Alice and her future husband, now exonerated, embrace.
Director
Frank Perugini
Film Details
Technical Specs
Articles
The Scar of Shame
The Scar of Shame (1927) is particularly intriguing among black-cast films because of its obvious ambition. Not satisfied to be merely a Hollywood-derivative drama with black actors, it endeavors to explore the delicate and often painful divisions that existed within African-American society of the day (a rift that was termed the "twoness" of black culture by educator and activist W.E.B. DuBois).
Lucia Lynn Moses stars as Louise, a young woman who is protected from an abusive stepfather (Norman Johnstone) by Alvin, an ambitious young composer (Harry Henderson). Although Louise is obviously beneath his social station, Alvin secretly marries her. With the help of a street hoodlum named Spike (William E. Pettus), the stepfather hatches a plan to regain control of his daughter. Louise comes to believe Alvin is ashamed of her, so she welcomes the life of vice, wealth and disgrace they propose. Alvin confronts them, shots are fired, and Louise receives a wound in her neck, a powerful symbol of her moral corruption.
The essential crisis of The Scar of Shame is the struggle to rise above the downward pull of the "street," and this conflict is represented quite effectively in the film's well-orchestrated (at times overwrought) dramatics. Just as Louise was unable to escape the influence of her stepfather, Alvin finds his promising future endangered by the secret romance of his past, suggesting that every level of black society faces obstacles beyond the obvious black/white struggle.
As was often the case with black-cast films, financing was provided by white investors (the productions of Oscar Micheaux stand as notable exceptions). The Scar of Shame was a product of the Colored Players Company, an enterprise founded by David Starkman, who also served as the film's screenwriter. The director, Frank Peregini, and cinematographer, Al Ligouri, were also white.
Established in Philadelphia in 1926 with a $100,000 investment, the CPC produced only three films before it was absorbed by another company. Tragically, neither of the other two films, A Prince of His Race (1926) and Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1921), survive today. In order to appear in the film, Moses, a dancer at Harlem's legendary Cotton Club, was required to commute (between performances) to the CHC studios in Philadelphia.
As screenwriter, Starkman may have organized the narrative plot of the film -- which was a direct descendent of the exaggerated Victorian melodrama -- but the more subtle themes of class separation were no doubt developed in cooperation with his African-American collaborators more attuned to the issues of caste within black society.
The film argues that environment, education and ambition are the determining factors in a person's life, but the film subverts its own message with the suggestion that position within the race is, to a degree, determined by the darkness of skin (Alvin and Louise are fair, while the stepfather and Spike are dark-complexioned). This correlation of light and dark with good and evil was a convention of the melodramatic stage, and was also employed in a number of black-cast films of the day.
Regardless of this flaw, The Scar of Shame remains an invaluable document of African-American history, for its forthright exploration of identity and ambition within the black middle class. Perhaps because the filmmakers and stars knew the The Scar of Shame would be viewed almost exclusively by black audiences, they felt free to explore the issues of racial identity that were beyond the awareness of white viewers, issues which would not be approached by the mainstream cinema until decades later.
Director: Frank Peregini
Producer: David Starkman
Screenplay: David Starkman
Cinematography: Al Liguori
Principal Cast: Harry Henderson (Alvin Hillyard), Norman Johnstone (Eddie Blake), Ann Kennedy (Mrs. Lucretia Green), Lucia Lynn Moses (Louise Howard), William Pettus (Spike Howard), Lawrence Chenault (Ralph Hathaway), Pearl McCormack (Alice Hathaway)
BW-76m.
by Bret Wood
The Scar of Shame
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
According to a modern source, this film was produced in Philadelphia. The same source states that the production team on the film, including the writer and director, were white, and that Sherman Dudley acted as the African-American front for white financing. The onscreen credits include a foreword describing the importance of environment in the shaping of a life. It includes the following lines: "If early in life some knowing, loving hand lights the lamp of knowledge and with tender care keeps it burning, then our course will run true 'til the end of our useful time on this earth, but if that lamp should fail through lack of loving hands to tend its hungry flame-then will come sorrow and SHAME!"