Summary
In the chiaroscuro of early American finance, a titan of ticker-tape, Ashley Hampdon, presides over mahogany-and-marble corridors where fortunes vaporize faster than champagne bubbles. His daughter Lina—part Pre-Raphaelite nymph, part Gibson-girl rebel—becomes the contested prize in a courtship that mutates into market warfare. Gregg Lewiston, whose smile is as polished as a newly minted coin, courts Lina with the patience of a card-shark; when affection stalls, he weaponizes bear raids, short-sell wolves, and whispered margin calls to implode Hampdon’s empire, wagering that a bankrupt sire will barter filial gratitude for solvency. Into this gilded cesspool gallops Bot White, a weather-scarred miner whose moral compass still points true north; years earlier Hampdon’s quiet kindness had staked White’s silver claim, and a scribbled I.O.U.—‘anytime, anywhere, blood or bullion’—now rustles out of a forgotten ledger like a promise incarnate. White strides from sagebrush to Park Avenue, trailing alkali dust and frontier justice, turning Lewiston’s own wiretap stratagem against him: a Dictagraph snakes between club-room ceilings, catching conspirators red-handed, reversing the market siege into a Midas windfall for the righteous. Reputation in tatters, Lewiston slithers from drawing-room to back-alley, his final gambit a coward’s swing of a bronze vase; retribution arrives via a half-mad speculator’s pistol, a poetic ricochet of ledger and lead. At curtainfall, two trains steam westward—one of them bearing Lina, now awakened from porcelain innocence to self-authored desire, chasing White across the observation-car gangway where misunderstandings dissolve like steam against dawn.
Synopsis
Ashley Hampdon, a Wall Street financier, has a daughter named Lina. Gregg Lewiston wants to marry the girl. The father tells him that the girl can please herself. As he does not seem to progress in his love-making, Lewiston puts through a scheme to ruin Hampdon in the market, so that the father will bring pressure to bear on his daughter to marry the suitor as he has lots of money. Hampdon is distracted by his losses. While aimlessly looking over his papers Hampdon comes across a little note signed by a western mining man, Bot White. It is an offer from White to assist Hampdon at any time and in any place, physically or financially. Hampdon had once befriended White and as he would not take anything else in return, White gave him the written offer. Hampdon sends a message to White to come to New York at once. When White appears, Hampdon tells him of his suspicion, that Lewiston injured him through an accomplice who had given him a wrong tip. Lina takes offense at a conversation she hears between Lewiston and White and tells White that she objects to him. He is put up at a club by Hampdon. There Lewiston sends Rankin (the same broker that he used to ruin Lewiston) to White with a tip on the market. White sends for detectives. They connect White's room with that of Lewiston's on a floor above by means of a wire and with the aid of a Dictaphone they overhear Lewiston and Rankin concocting a scheme to ruin White as a friend of Lewiston and a possible rival to Lina's hand. White and Hampdon use this information to make a fortune much to the discomfiture of Lewiston. As his treachery is now revealed, Lewiston is unable to win Lina. He goes to the club and insults White by saying in a loud tone of voice that this is the first case he has known of a man trying to buy a girl. White wants him to fight, but Lewiston excuses himself by remarking that it is a gentlemen's club. Finally Lewiston strikes White for calling him a coward, but spectators separate the men. Lewiston goes to his uptown home and White follows him. There is a fight and White gets the best of it till Lewiston hits White over the head with a bronze vase. Just then John Worth, who is a friend of White's and is half crazed from losses due to the villainy of Lewiston, appears at a window and shoots Lewiston in the arm. White having accomplished his mission, goes to bid his friend, Ashley Hampdon, good-bye. Lina has come to admire White for his loyalty to her father and for his efficiency. He does not seem to understand the change in her and bids her farewell. She, however, gets her father to take her on the same train on which White goes. They meet on the platform of the observation car where the misunderstanding is cleared.
Review Excerpt
"
Picture the neon of The Wolf of Wall Street flickering out, replaced by gas-lamps and Edison bulbs, and you’ll arrive at Between Men—a 1915 relic that somehow feels scaldingly contemporary. The film stitches together two mythic veins of American storytelling: the granite-jawed cowboy and the rapacious financier, genres usually segregated like warring saloons. Director William S. Hart, granite jaw incarnate, understood that the real frontier wasn’t merely geographic; it was fiduciary. Greed ride..."
