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Lost Boundaries

Screening on Film
Free Admission
Directed by Alfred L. Werker.
With Beatrice Pearson, Mel Ferrer, Richard Hylton.
US, 1949, 35mm, black & white, 99 min.

Mel Ferrer stars as a light-skinned African-American whose family has been passing as white for over twenty years in a provincial New Hampshire village. When the truth is revealed, their neighbors want them thrown out of town much to the dismay of the children who have grown up believing they are white. A fairly conventional melodrama, the film was somewhat daring for its time, although its impact is undermined by the casting of Mel Ferrer, a white actor, in the lead role (a common practice in many Hollywood films about “passing”).

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