Summary
A Bowery lantern flickers across two generations, first illuminating Flossy Wilson’s scarlet silhouette as she trades the gutter for the fragile respectability promised by idealistic clerk Henry Clay Madison; their love corrodes under the acid of her self-loathing, and she vanishes into the tenement labyrinth, pregnant, unmarried, convinced she has spared him contamination. Seventeen winters later the same lantern throws its guttering light on Fifty-Fifty Mamie—half brass, half bruise—who hustles pool halls and back-room gin while Madison has calcified into a platinum-veined tycoon, his heart entombed inside a brick-walled cannery that devours children like sardines. Mamie is lured toward redemption by Bert, Madison’s reformist nephew, a social-worker knight armed with statistics and a stubborn faith in human clay; their tentative Eden collapses when Madison, scenting scandal, bribes Mamie to vanish. She descends instead into the factory’s sub-basement, a soot-black maze where eight-year-olds shuck peas until their fingers bleed, and there she becomes the living fuse to a catastrophe: a single kerosene lamp topples, stairwells turn to chimneys, and dozens of small bodies are baked into the bricks. Crawling from the charnel with a spine full of fire, Mamie deliriously calls for Bert; Madison, hearing his own lost lover’s name tumble from her cracked lips, unearths the photograph that proves she is the daughter he never claimed. In the sterile hush of a charity ward she dies, but not before her gaze brands him with immutable guilt; the tycoon, stripped at last of every alibi, staggers out to wander wharves and sweatshops, a penitent Midas determined to reverse every golden crime he minted.
Synopsis
Young Henry Clay Madison, a clerk, falls in love with Flossy Wilson, a prostitute from New York's East Side. Although she reforms under his influence, Flossy believes that she is unworthy of Madison and rejects his marriage proposal. Seventeen years later, Madison's nephew Bert, a social worker, falls in love with wanton Fifty-Fifty Mamie, reforms her and elicits her help in his work. Bert falls ill, and when Mamie tries to visit him, Madison, who now is concerned only with money, convinces her to give up the idea of marrying Bert. Mamie goes to work in Madison's canning factory to investigate conditions. In addition to employing children, Madison's factory has no fire escape and only one staircase, which catches fire, many children die and Mamie is seriously injured. Madison visits Mamie, who cries Bert's name in delirium. When Madison brings Bert, now recovered, Madison notices a photograph of Flossy, Mamie's mother and realizes that Mamie is his daughter. She dies in Bert's arms, and Madison resolves to toil for the welfare of workers and the end of child slavery.
Review Excerpt
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John H. Collins’ Children of Eve arrives like a nitrate ghost, crackling with the same sulfurous whiff that singed Jacob Riis’ camera plates. Shot in 1915, when the Triangle sweat was still damp in Manhattan’s collective collar, the film weaponizes melodrama: it flays the view..."
