The Scar of Shame

Colored Players Film Corporation, 1929, Philadelphia: a Black concert pianist (Harry Henderson) marries a working-class girl (Lucia Lynn Moses) to save her from her stepfather, and the marriage cannot survive the class that made it. Frank Perugini directed; the title is the mark she carries. It is the most careful of the silent race films: interiors, a caste system, a melodramatic engine used on people the studios would only have as comics. The scar is not on her face. It is the plot.