Editor's Top Picks Sharing the Atmosphere of The Scarlet Road: Cult Guide

The The Scarlet Road Phenomenon

The synthesis of form and function in The Scarlet Road to establish Unknown Director as a true visionary of the 1916s.

Harry Tremaine, a clean-living youth of twenty-one, spends his leisure hours in perfecting an aeroplane motor which he has invented and which he hopes will eventually make his fortune. In his ambition to make his mark in the world, he is encouraged by his mother's old friend, Mrs. Holbrook, to whose daughter, Alice, Harry has been engaged almost since childhood. One night, when Harry is working late at the office in which he is employed as bookkeeper, a telegram arrives for the manager of the concern. Harry learns that the manager is dining at the Café de Paris and takes the message to him there. Thus Harry is first brought in contact with the gay night life of New York. There, too, he first sees Betty Belgrave, a cabaret entertainer, and her dancing partner, Wilbur Lorimer. It is not long afterward that Harry Tremaine receives word that his father, who for a number of years has been leading a hermit's life in the mining country out west, has suddenly died. Still later he learns that instead of using the money which he had thought he was contributing to his father's support, the hermit had saved all of it, and in addition left him a fortune of nearly $200,000. Harry's first thought is that there is no longer any bar to the marriage of himself and Alice, and the wedding day is set. Circumstances again bring Harry into the sphere of Betty Belgrave and her dancing partner, this time as a bashful, awkward youth, but as a young man about town who has plenty of money to spend. The woman has little trouble in conquering Harry. The consequence is that with her wedding day approaching, Alice finds herself more and more neglected by her fiancé. Day by day she sees him less frequently and day by day he becomes more thoroughly enmeshed in Betty's net of fascinations. Finally, on New Year's Eve, comes a complete break between the engaged couple as the result of Harry's escapades. Then, after a few short weeks of riotous living, during which he spends money like water to gratify Betty's whims, and buys thousands of dollars' worth of worthless stocks offered by Wilbur, Harry suddenly awakens to the fact that he is "broke." Naturally, he is deserted by his gay friends, first of all by Betty and Wilbur the parasites. Unable to obtain employment, he is soon reduced to desperate straits. One day Harry calls upon his father's lawyer who gives him a letter left by the hermit "to be delivered to my son when he shall have dissipated his fortune." The letter explains that the father has foreseen the follies of the son and has provided "a way out." Harry is instructed to make his way to the hermit's cabin in the western wilds, and told that there he will find a solution of his problem. After many weeks of weary search, Harry finds the cabin. He is startled to find that from the ceiling of the hut there dangles a hangman's noose. This, then, is "the way out" promised. The shock of this discovery makes the boy a man. He resolves to go back to New York, to fight it out, to show his father's grim old ghost that Harry Tremaine is a man. In New York he rescues a little girl from drowning. She proves to be the daughter of a millionaire and the grateful father helps Harry in the latter's effort to interest capital in his aeroplane motor. A company is formed to manufacture the device, and some time later Harry is in possession of another fortune, but this time it is a fortune which he has earned. Betty learns of his new opulence and again tries to ensnare him, this time without success. In his environment, Harry finds his thoughts by day and his nightly dreams haunted by visions of the noose, that grim bequest left by his prophetic-souled old father. Finally he determines to go to the hut and destroy the noose, to gloat over the memory of his cruel legacy now that he has proved his father's estimate of him wrong. Once he finds himself in the cabin he taunts the memory of his father and then, in a burst of anger, tears the noose from the ceiling of the hut. To his surprise a shower of golden coins pours from the ragged hole thus made in the plaster above his head. In a moment his father's plan is clear to him; when discouraged, he should have tried to take his own life, this second fortune would have come to him. Chastened in spirit, he returns to the city. Again in New York, he learns that Alice is seriously ill. He hurries to her side and they are reunited. The last scenes show us their home some time later. We see them drive happily through the park in their splendid limousine, while from a park bench, Betty, now a derelict, sadly looks after them as the picture fades.