Summary
Salt-stiff pages of glossy monthlies flutter in the hands of Margot, a lanky adolescent who has never known maternal lullabies, only the hush of brine against barnacled hulls. Her gaze, the color of storm-tide glass, fixes on a rotogravure portrait of Jack Rutledge—ivory-flannel scion whose yacht cleaves the same cove that siphons her father’s nets. When a spark from a careless cigarette turns a gilded launch into a pillar of orange, Margot’s linen dress blisters while she drags a half-swooned heiress ashore; the act magnetizes Jack’s widowed mother, who installs the waif amid marble busts and Bechstein sonatas. Adele, Jack’s serpentine elder sister, tastes gall in every courtesy shown to the newcomer, her sidelong smiles sharp enough to slice ermine. Jack, however, hears only the tremolo of his own ventricle when Margot hums a sea-shanty off-key, and within a moon-cycle he kneels amid moonlit columbines to offer a sapphire the size of a gull’s eye. Mrs. Rutledge, steel filament beneath Belgian lace, threatens entailment forfeiture; Jack’s jaw slackens; Margot, cheeks mottled by shame, petitions the night stagecoach home. Her sire, a taciturn man who tattoos each catch on his forearm with India ink, bars the door: your mother sprang from Newport blood, he rasps, go claim the birthright her lungs forfeited. While Jack dutifully squires a porcelain heiress through croquet mallet arcs, Margot stumbles upon Adele’s clandestine correspondence with Alexander Gibson—married steel magnate whose yacht is a floating seraglio. A warning whispered in a conservatory of staghorn ferns detonates Adele’s vanity; revolver metal glints; a stray bullet burrows through Gibson’s starched dickey. Adele’s scream curdles into accusation; officers clap iron around Margot’s wrists; courtroom mahogany drinks the girl’s refusal to deflect blame. On the dawn scaffold, as gulls wheel like torn paper, Adele’s contrition erupts; the governor’s telegram gallops through mist; wedding bells clang over breakers while gull-wing silk flutters against naval wool.
Synopsis
Margot, the motherless daughter of a New England fisherman, reads society magazines and dreams of a better life. She falls in love with a photograph of Jack Rutledge, a wealthy heir residing on the other side of the cove. For rescuing her from a burning launch, Jack's mother takes in Margot, a situation that provokes the jealousy of Jack's sister Adele. Enamored of the guileless Margot, Jack proposes marriage, but Mrs. Rutledge intervenes, forcing her son to court a woman of equal social standing. Dejected, Margot begs to go home, but her father insists that because her mother was of high birth, she is worthy of Jack's attentions. Margot learns of Adele's affair with a married man, Alexander Gibson, and warns her against continuing the romance. Believing Margot to be interested in Gibson herself, Adele flies into a jealous rage, and the lover is accidentally shot in the struggle. Margot is accused of the murder and nobly accepts the guilty verdict, but Adele finally vindicates her and she is able to marry Jack.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I saw A Daughter of the Sea, it was a 16-mm bootleg on a bedsheet tacked to my dorm-room wall; the projector bulb coughed ochre ghosts across the cinder-block while a nor’easter rattled the panes like inadequate piano accompaniment. Nearly two decades later, Kino’s 4K restoration—tinted the way nitrate originally breathed—feels less like nostalgia than like discovering an opal at low tide: each hue refracts a different cruelty of class.
Frances Marion, writing at white heat betw..."
