Summary
In a metropolis whose boulevards glitter like broken glass, Andrews—once a mere ink-stained shipping clerk—now presides over a white-powder empire that reeks of ship-hold bilge and champagne regrets. His daughter May, spun from debutante silk and restless dreams, loves Joe, an incorruptible patrolman whose badge gleams like a moral lighthouse. Andrews, appalled that blue blood might mix with blue wool, thrusts her toward Roger Hastings, velvet-scarved darling of the cafésociety whose veins already hum with secret snow. The marriage curdles on its wedding-night orchids: Roger’s pupils dilate into black suns, May’s innocence curdles into tremor, and the mansion’s corridors echo with the hiss of insufflation. A nervous collapse lands May in a satin-lined sickroom; Roger, craving accomplice and heir, dusts her nightly pills with crystalline deceit until her pulse syncopates to his junkie waltz. Father, confronted with the monstrous bloom he financed, locks his only child inside sanatorium walls that sweat chloral hydrate. Roger, now pimp and procurer for a syndicate trading in white flesh, orders the abduction of Julia—Joe’s sister, May’s mirror—shuttling her to a bordello whose red lamps pulse like infected hearts. Yet even gilded rot revolts: Julia’s screams fracture Roger’s complacency, the gang fractures in turn, and the narrative spirals into a danse macabre of arson, bullets, and collapsing chandeliers. When the smoke clears, only Joe stands amid the embers, carrying a newly detoxed May across the threshold of a dawn whose light feels almost punitive.
Synopsis
Andrews, a former shipping clerk, has amassed a fortune in cocaine and therefore discourages his daughter May's romance with Joe, a policeman. Andrews prefers socialite Roger Hastings, whom May marries but soon discovers is a drug addict. While May is recovering from a nervous breakdown precipitated by the knowledge of Roger's addiction, he slips cocaine into her medication. Soon she also is addicted, a fact which Roger delightedly reports to Andrews. Andrews then commits May to a sanitarium and Roger becomes a procurer for a gang of white slavers. When the gang abducts his sister Julia and takes her to Roger's brothel, he turns against them. Julia is released, and after many complications, Roger returns to Andrews' house and, during a struggle, sets the house on fire, killing them both. Finally, Joe rescues a newly cured May and the two are reunited.
Review Excerpt
"Powder-Burned Opulence: There is a moment—brief as a match-flare—when Cocaine Traffic feels less like a 1914 morality yarn and more like a futurist prophecy hurled backward through time. Director Edwin DeWolf (also brooding magnetically as Andrews) stages the first-act soirée as a stroboscopic fever: champagne geysers, jazz-troupe rag syncopated to cocaine jitters, and a camera that glides across parquet like a gossip. The print I viewed, restored by EYE Filmmuseum, still bears chemical pockmark..."
