Summary
A gilded household fractures when prodigal Edith glides back from European salons to discover her jurist father yoked to a sphinx-like bride who smuggles into the manor a secret progeny—Dick, once crushed beneath the old man’s gavel, now a ink-stained night-hawk haunting the city’s underbelly while still tethered to the hydra-headed Brownlow syndicate. In the hush between waltzes and whispered recriminations, a vial of radium—luminescent as Medea’s jealousy—vanishes from the doctor’s traveling safe, and the judge’s heart is stilled forever by an unseen hand. Love-struck Edith and her tarnished knight become the accused, their alibi a fragile filament against the rope of precedent. Yet in the candle-scented gloom of a cobbler’s shop, a father who stitches soles confesses he crept through the judge’s corridors hoping to distill miracle-light for his twisted child, and through a cracked doorway watched scarlet shadows enact their fatal mime. With the gang unmasked and the noose redirected, Dick steps into dawn’s forgiving glare, Edith’s hand in his, while the physician redirects his miracle cure toward the lame boy’s limbs—an epilogue stitched not with justice but with the merciful ambiguity of human residue.
Synopsis
Edith Sturgis, the daughter of a judge, returns from studies abroad to find her widowed father remarried. The new Mrs. Sturgis does not reveal that she has a son Dick, once unjustly jailed by Judge Sturgis, but now working as a reporter while still maintaining an association with the Brownlow gang. Quarrelling with her stepmother, Edith leaves home, meets Dick and falls in love. While Dr. and Mrs. Allen (whom Edith met on the steamer) are visiting in the Sturgis home, the doctor's valuable radium is stolen from the safe, and Judge Sturgis is found murdered. Dick, though with Edith at the time, is accused of the crime. Finally, an old shoemaker confesses that he entered the house to steal the radium, with which to cure his crippled son, and witnessed the judge's slaying by the Brownlow gang. Dick is freed and finds happiness with Edith, and the doctor helps the crippled boy.
Review Excerpt
"
Marie Shotwell’s matriarch glides across the parquet like a predatory swan, every fold of her tea-gown concealing matrimonial chess moves; the camera, timid yet voracious, drinks in the tension until the gaslights hiss.
There is, in this 1916 one-reeler stretched to five acts, a perfume of law-book leather mingled with the metallic sting of radium—an element so coveted it glows like original sin. Edison-bleached intertitles flicker, announcing Edith Sturgis’s homecoming not as domestic celebr..."
