Noted Actor to Speak at Historic Film
Carleton Carpenter, one of the stars of the 1949 film, Lost Boundaries, will be in Keene on Monday, April 18th, at 7 p.m., to introduce a screening of the film and answer audience questions afterward. Lost Boundaries, produced by two-time Academy Award winner and New Hampshire resident Louis de Rochemont, was a ground-breaking film, one of the earliest post-war Hollywood films to depict African Americans as real subjects.
The film is based on the true story of the light-skinned African American doctor Albert Johnston who, with his family, moved to Keene and passed for white until his heritage was discovered during a Navy background check at the outbreak of the second world war. Shot in New Hampshire and Maine and starring Mel Ferrer, Beatrice Pearson, and Carleton Carpenter, Lost Boundaries won a Cannes Film Festival award and a New York Times award and played in midtown Manhattan for six months.
The story first appeared in Readers Digest in 1947 and was published in book form the following year, before the film was released in 1949.
This was Carleton Carpenter’s first film; he went on to make a dozen more, including Summer Stock with Judy Garland and Two Weeks with Love with Debbie Reynolds. He would also make a second film for de Rochemont, The Whistle at Eaton Falls, also set in New Hampshire.
The event will take place in Centennial Hall in the Alumni Center on Main St. It’s free of charge, and open to the public. Sponsored by the KSC Film Studies Department and the Office of Diversity and Multiculturalism.
