Summary
Gaslit cobblestones glisten like obsidian beneath a sodium moon while a syncopated Charleston leaks from a Limehouse dance-hall whose doors exhale gin and punters’ sweat. Inside, a girl with patent-leather curls—half music-box ballerina, half dockside siren—twirls between three men who orbit her as if she were the last lit cigarette in wartime London. One is a sailor with salt still crystallised on his lashes, pockets rattling with foreign coins and promises; another, a bespectacled clerk whose ledgers conceal erotic daydreams inked in violet; the third, a louche aristocrat whose cane hides a stiletto thin enough to slice a rival’s shadow. Their rivalry detonates across nocturnal Thames embankments, candle-lit tenements, and a rooftop pagoda where paper lanterns mimic constellations. Griffith fractures chronology: a cockfight dissolves into a Salvation Army parade; a cockney lullaby bleeds into a Expressionist nightmare of looming close-ups where pupils dilate like bullet wounds. By the time the fog lifts, the girl’s laughter—once a glittering currency—has become the film’s true protagonist, leaving the men bankrupt of illusion and the audience clutching a volatile souvenir: the vertigo of desire commodified in the electric half-light of 1921.
Synopsis
Three men in London compete for the love of a dance-hall girl.
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