Summary
From the moment the film’s emulsion crackles to life, we are hurled into a craggy, wind-scoured moral badland where grievance has calcified into obsession. “Ace” Hall, once a virile spark, now lurches through frame after frame like a scarecrow stitched from regret and shrapnel, his shattered spine a living indictment of the night Nelson Miles stole Alice Blake’s affections and sent the rivals’ carriage through a guard-rail and into the abyss. The camera, jittery yet exacting, watches Hall drag himself from the wreckage, clutching not his mangled legs but the phantom warmth of Alice’s gloved hand—the hand that will never again reach for him. Years bleed away in a single iris-out, and when the aperture opens again Hall has fashioned a hermit kingdom inside a derelict ore mill, its rusted gantries and moonlit pulleys groaning like iron lungs. Here he raises Judson, the kidnapped heir to the Miles lineage, feeding the boy on bedtime stories of betrayal while the child’s real parents grieve somewhere beyond the gorge. Judson grows into a chiseled innocent, his eyes holding the very sky that Hall swore off; Hall, in turn, grows ever more spectral, a puppeteer whose strings are spun from barbed wire. The narrative corkscrews when Hall discovers Sherry—luminous, quick-witted, and by every outward sign a Miles—sketching waterfowl along the same cliff where his life detonated. Rather than extinguish her, he plots a baroque coup de grâce: marry Judson to Sherry, fuse the bloodlines he despises, and watch the house of Miles cannibalize itself. The wedding sequence, shot in a candle-lit barn amid whorls of sawdust and tubercular moonlight, plays like a pagan rite: Alice, now silver-haired, barges in and the secret Judson’s parentage detonates mid-aisle. Yet the film pivots on Alice’s next breath—Sherry, she declares, was adopted, a foundling rescued from the same storm that crippled Hall. In that instant the curse evaporates; the lovers clutch each other while Hall, robbed of his last illusion, staggers backward into a shadowed corner where a forgotten lantern kisses a cache of blasting powder. The final blast is not a spectacle but a sigh: a bloom of orange that briefly tattoos the lovers’ silhouettes onto splintered planks, then darkness, then the soft hush of snow beginning to fall through the open roof.
"Ace" Hall is a bitter, half-crazed man who was disabled as a result of losing Alice Blake to Nelson Miles and going over a cliff in a fight with Miles. Hall kidnaps the Mileses' infant son and rears the boy, Judson, as his own. He later discovers that there is also a beautiful Miles daughter, Sherry. Plotting his final revenge, Hall maneuvers Judson into marriage to his own sister. At the wedding ceremony, Alice learns Judson's identity, but she then reveals that Sherry was adopted. The young couple finds happiness, and Hall dies in an explosion.
Review Excerpt
"
The first time I saw Dawn of Revenge I emerged from the vault blinking like a cavefish, convinced I’d inhaled nitrate ghosts; the second time I noticed how every doorway frames a coffin-shape, how Hall’s crutch beats a Morse code of resentment against the floorboards. By the third screening I stopped counting motifs and simply surrendered to its savage lullaby.
Richard Travers plays Hall with a gait so off-kilter he seems perpetually mid-stumble, yet his eyes—those twin furnace doors—never wa..."
