Summary
In a sepia-tinged hamlet where the air tastes of clover and cowbells, Hester Bevins—skin freckled by agrarian suns—feels the first tremors of metropolitan hunger. She trades butter-churn lullabies for the hiss of El trains, her cotton prints swapped for mink collars that smell of another woman’s perfume. Enter a Midas-touched magnate whose moral compass spins like a roulette wheel: he drapes her in velvet promises, installs her in a penthouse aquarium, and teaches her the vertigo of champagne dawns. Meanwhile Jerry, the village boy whose love once fit in a jam jar, staggers home from Verdun with shrapnel for eyes and a pulse that beats in Morse code for her name. The film becomes a scalene love triangle skewered on class, war, and time; every close-up of Hester’s pupils is a referendum on whether gilt can outshine memory. In the final reel she races through a hospital corridor that smells of carbolic and unspoken guilt, her silk hem drinking iodine from the floor, while off-screen artillery still rehearses its thunder. The choice she makes is less a verdict than an autopsy of American longing.
Synopsis
Hester Bevins is a simple country girl who yearns for adventure. Though she has a handsome young man, Jerry, who is devoted to her, she leaves her village and goes to New York in search of a grander life. There she becomes the lover of a wealthy and unscrupulous businessman. But when Jerry returns blinded and dying from the war, Hester must choose between her new life and the man whose loyalty to her has never failed.
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