Summary
Across an ocean that once shimmered with possibility, the Messereau siblings—Marie’s lucid gaze, Helene’s brittle grace, Paul’s restless sinew—step off the gang-plank into a New World that promises amber wheat and bottomless sky. They drag with them Hans Grossman, Helene’s betrothed, whose German vowels still clank against the iron of Ellis Island. For a season the quartet stitch themselves into the seams of a Pennsylvania mill town: looms clatter, coins mount, café-au-lait is served in tin cups, and the American night smells of coal smoke and lilac. Then the war that Europe swore would last a summer reaches across the Atlantic and yanks Paul and Hans back into its churning maw, leaving the sisters clutching ration books and dread. Into this vacuum drifts Robert Vorhis, heir to a bench-bound patriarch, his eyes the color of wet shale; he courts Marie with library quotations and Ferris-wheel kisses until a poison-tongued rival whispers that her virtue is as frayed as the silk in a bargain-bin garter. Stung, Robert decamps with his parents to a sun-scorched California Eden, nursing a wound that will not scab. Meanwhile Helene’s lungs bloom crimson roses; Marie, frantic, queries strangers for the address of a sanatorium and is hustled into a paddy-wagon on suspicion of street-walking. Judge Vorhis—Robert’s father, marble-etched with jurisprudence—dismisses the charge, but the courthouse steps are slick with spit and shame. Homecoming brings worse: two telegrams crisp as winter leaves, announcing deaths in Verdun mud, and upstairs Helene’s silhouette dissolves into a noose of bedsheets. Marie, stripped of kin, books passage back to a France she no longer recognizes. On the pier, steam whistles a funeral hymn; Robert, unable to exorcise her memory, vaults the gangway and folds her into the grammar of second chances while the Atlantic churns copper beneath.
Synopsis
Marie Messereau, with her sister Helene and brother Paul, emigrates from France to America, the land of promise, accompanied by Helene's German fiancé, Hans Grossman. The four find employment, and all goes well until Paul and Hans are called back to Europe to fight in World War I. Robert Vorhis falls in love with Marie, but because a rejected suitor tells him that Marie's reputation is stained, he accompanies his parents to California to forget her. Helene contracts tuberculosis, and when Marie, in seeking the location of a hospital for consumptives, asks several men their address, she is arrested for street walking. Robert's father, Judge Vorhis, acquits her, but upon returning home, she discovers that Paul and Hans have been killed in battle and that her sister has committed suicide. Broken, Marie decides to return to France and is about to sail when Robert, who has been unable to forget her, rushes up the gangplank and takes her in his arms.
Review Excerpt
"The first time we see Marie Messereau, she is nothing but a silhouette against the projector’s guttering arc-light: a charcoal sketch of a woman clutching a cardboard suitcase that bears the chalk scrawl "P—F for Philadelphia." In that instant, Marguerite Marsh conjures an entire cosmology of displacement without uttering a syllable. The silence is not absence but pressure—an aural vacuum into which the viewer’s heartbeat rushes like floodwater. Director Edward Lynch understands that in 1918 the..."
