Summary
Morning light fractures over a metropolis of clattering trams and whispered gossip when Arthur Frome—immaculate suit, breath of rye—stumbles from a speakeasy and, in a blink of inebriated impunity, hurls a paperboy beneath the grinding wheels of a Packard. Blood on cobblestones, headlines still fluttering, the moment cleaves his marriage like a guillotine. Edith, once dazzled by golden promises, packs her silence and vanishes, leaving Arthur with a decanter for consolation and guilt for a bedfellow. Years slither past; the tycoon dries out, but penance calcifies into obsession. When Edith reappeares—eyes fathomless, lips stitched with secrets—Arthur’s thirst returns in a different flavor: suspicion. She and the urbane Dr. Brent make pilgrimages to a shuttered townhouse where a wan child wheezes under eiderdown. Arthur hires a petty thief’s wife as shadow; the trail ends at a sickroom where he confronts a small face shaped uncannily like his own. Edith’s revelation detonates: their offspring, born while Arthur marinated in spirits, spirited away lest the father’s fumes poison a nascent life. Just as contrition inches toward reconciliation, the cuckolded tracker’s husband—convinced his wife warms the doctor’s sheets—fires a revolver in a night of skewed jealousies. Arthur’s collapsed lung mirrors the child’s failing heart; both hover at the liminal veil while Edith bargains with fate. Dr. Brent’s scalpel and love steer the triad from brinks: the boy convalesces, Arthur’s chest re-inflates with hope, and dawn finally glints on a family photograph that no longer reeks of whiskey.
Synopsis
Successful businessman Arthur Frome, who drinks too much, pushes a newsboy under an automobile, causing him severe injuries. His wife Edith then becomes disillusioned with her husband and leaves him. After an absence of a few years, Edith returns to her husband but offers no explanation of her behavior. Soon, though, Arthur becomes suspicious when she and their family friend Dr. Brent frequently visit a house in which a small child is living. Arthur has Edith followed by the wife of one of his employees, whom he has caught stealing, and soon discovers that the child, who is gravely ill, is his own. Edith confesses that she did not want to raise their child under the influence of a drunkard, so she left him in someone else's care. Soon after this confession, Arthur is shot by the husband of the woman who has followed Edith because the man suspected his wife of having an affair. Arthur recovers, as does the child, and through Dr. Brent's intervention, Arthur and Edith happily reconcile and plan a new life.
Review Excerpt
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A canvas of chiaroscuro morality
Albert Capellani’s Daybreak arrives like a brittle glass-plate negative unearthed in a dusty attic: fragile, flammable, yet etched with silhouettes that refuse to dissolve. The film’s prologue—an upper-crust bacchanal drenched in Art Deco shadows—announces its preoccupation with surfaces that crack under moral weight. Arthur Frome, sheened in tuxedo satin, toasts the roaring twenties; cinematographer Harold Rosson’s vignetted close-ups already foreshadow the s..."
