The Scar of Shame

Significance in Race Film History

The Colored Players Film Corporation, an independent silent film company based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was founded in 1926 by white entrepreneur and theater owner David Starkman, in partnership with Louis Groner and Roy Calnek. They were joined in 1927 by popular black vaudevillian and stage performer Sherman H. Dudley (“Uncle Dud”), who was named the titular president. But, in fact, Starkman remained in charge of the company’s operation, management, and finances; and it was money from white backers that funded the films that the company produced.

Intent on distinguishing themselves from other race film companies, the Colored Players used expensive sets and employed prominent black actors such as Lawrence Chenault, Harry Henderson, and Shingzie Howard in the four pictures the company released: A Prince of His Race (1926); Ten Nights in a Bar-Room (1926), a black version of the familiar temperance novel Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854) by Timothy Shay Arthur (later adapted as a stage melodrama by William W. Pratt and in several silent film versions, including one by Oscar Apfel in 1921); Children of Fate (1927); and The Scar of Shame (which began filming in 1927 but was not released until two years later).

The story of an ill-fated marriage between middle-class, well-educated Alvin Hillyard (Harry Henderson), a promising composer, and Louise Howard (Lucia Lynn Moses), a former washwoman who finds employment at Mrs. Green’s “select” boarding house, The Scar of Shame revealed the caste divisions that existed even among black Americans. Alvin marries Louise largely out of pity, to protect her from her drunken and abusive stepfather Spike and from the racketeer Eddie Black, who wants to make her the star attraction at his nightclub. But Alvin is embarrassed to introduce Louise to his mother, who he knows will not accept his new wife because of her lower-class background. After Alvin continues to neglect her, Louise (who is described in the film as a “child of her environment”) finds herself forced back into her former life—although not before implicating Alvin in an assault that he did not commit. Later, Louise, now bearing the “scar” of her shame, encounters Alvin again; but it is too late for her to find happiness.

From a technical perspective, The Scar of Shame was quite sophisticated. The intercutting of scenes, for example, contrasted the two women in Alvin’s life (the debauched Louise at the noisy Club Lido and the proper Alice at home at her piano). The recurring use of music served as a leitmotif and as a way of defining and identifying the main characters. And other motifs and symbols (such as Louise’s baby doll) not only helped to advance the story line but also provided commentaries, both subtle and overt, on race relations between dark-skinned and light-skinned blacks and on the black working class. The Scar of Shame is now recognized as one of the best independent productions, black or white, of the silent era.

- Barbara Tepa Lupack