Legion of Terror

Legion of Terror is a 1936 American drama/action film, directed by Charles C. Coleman. The film, which stars Bruce Cabot, Marguerite Churchill, Ward Bond, and Crawford Weaver, is a fictionalized story about the real-life Ku Klux Klan splinter group called the Black Legion of the 1930s. It was inspired by the May 1935 murder in Michigan of Charles Poole, a Works Progress Administration worker.

The film preceded and also inspired the making of the critically acclaimed 1937 Warner Bros. feature film Black Legion, which co-starred Humphrey Bogart, Dick Foran, Erin O'Brien-Moore and Ann Sheridan which was based on the same case.

In Washington, D.C., postal inspectors Frank Marshall and his friend, "Slim" Hewitt, are both sworn in as postal inspectors. After a bomb which was sent from the fictional town Stanfield, Connecticut, that was addressed to U.S. Senator Morton is found in the Senate mailroom, Frank and Slim are both sent to Stanfield to investigate. On the train, Frank becomes acquainted with one Nancy Foster, a resident of Stanfield. When they arrive, Frank and Slim take on assumed names and get jobs in a local factory. When Frank goes to Nancy's house for dinner, her brother Don tells him that the Hood Legion (a group similar to that of the 1930s militant separatist political/fascist paramilitary group Black Legion) has complete control of the town.

Soon Frank and Slim both realize that the factory where they work as well as the local newspaper is in the legion's control. Don has received several threatening letters advising him to join the legion. Frank and Slim successfully infiltrate the group by undergoing an initiation ceremony in which masked members in long robes blindfold Frank and Slim and hold guns to their heads before giving them each a bullet as a token of their membership.