Summary
A continent tilting toward anarchy disgorges its most luminous relics into the clammy vault of a Manhattan financier; blood-ruby diadems, sapphires the shade of bruised twilight, and pearls that once trembled on the collarbones of queens are smuggled across the Atlantic in a plain leather grip. Maxwell Grey—ice-blooded, Yale-forged, a man who numbers railroads the way gamblers count aces—becomes the unwilling custodian of a sovereignty reduced to glittering freight. Into the gilded vacuum of his brownstone sweeps Madame Levine, a serpent in sable, her smile an enameled crescent behind which whole dynasties have vanished. She speaks five languages, wears mortality like an ermine stole, and collects other people’s secrets the way lepidopterists pin wings. Beside her drifts Diana De Lille, a Parisian waif whose eyes still carry the smoke of barricades; she has crossed borders sewn inside a hay-cart, traded her last communion ring for a steamship ticket, and now serves canapés to jewel thieves while memorizing the cadence of their footsteps. Kenneth Grey, heir to ledgers and empire, has never feared anything that could not be discounted to zero—until he finds himself bargaining his heart against a passport forged at midnight. The film coils these four around one another like the filigree of a Fabergé egg, then drops the egg from a great height: corridors chase themselves in Möbius loops, footlights gutter into darkness just as a gloved hand reaches for the crown, and every gilded doorframe becomes a proscenium for betrayal. By the final reel, the monarchy is ash, the jewels are loose change in a swindler’s pocket, and love—fractured, self-interrogating—must decide whether it is merely another commodity or the last counterfeit-proof currency left in a world drunk on its own smoke.
Synopsis
When a revolution breaks out in a small European monarchy, the king sends his crown jewels to an American banker, Maxwell Grey, to keep them out of danger. However, Madame Levine, the head of an international jewel theft ring, finds out and plans to steal the jewels. She poses as a wealthy society matron and befriends Grey. Young French refugee Diana De Lille, who at first was taken in by Madame Levine, begins to suspect that the woman is not who she says she is, and confides her suspicions to Kenneth Grey, the banker's son, who has fallen in love with her.
Review Excerpt
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Robert F. Hill’s Crown Jewels arrives like a lacquered music-box found in a flea-market: at first glance merely quaint, yet once pried open it exhales the metallic scent of revolutions and the colder perfume of fiduciary detachment. The picture, released in the bruised autumn of 1918 when Europe still bled from one war and Hollywood was readying another—on audiences’ sensibilities—positions itself as a high-society caper. In truth it i..."
