Summary
Reginald Mallory exists as a tragicomic vessel of sybaritic vulnerability, a man whose entire psychological architecture has been forged by the relentless kiln of unearned praise. This narrative trajectory traces his ascent—and subsequent moral vertigo—as a civil engineer whose technical aptitude is eclipsed by a catastrophic susceptibility to adulation. Upon being thrust into the epicenter of municipal governance by a Machiavellian syndicate of venal politicians, Mallory becomes the unwitting architect of his own disgrace. He is maneuvered into endorsing a structural travesty: a new City Hall designed as a hollow monument to graft, prioritizing fiscal extraction over civic safety. While the populace and his peers recoil from his perceived descent into chicanery, only Betty Biddle, the scion of a construction magnate, perceives the flickering ember of integrity beneath his vanity. The denouement serves as a pyrotechnic purgation; Mallory orchestrates a dual demolition, utilizing documentary evidence to dismantle the political cartel's immunity and literal explosives to level the substandard edifice, thereby reclaiming his soul through the spectacular destruction of his own compromised labor.
Synopsis
Petted and pampered all his life, Reginald Mallory has grown to manhood easily swayed by flattery. On the verge of an outstanding career in civil engineering, he is appointed city engineer by a corrupt cartel of politicians and contractors, who use his vanity to further their crooked ends. Mallory is wheedled into signing a contract for the construction of a new city hall that will provide the minimum of quality at the maximum of cost. Everyone loses faith in Mallory except Betty Biddle, his sweetheart, who is the daughter of the president of a construction company. Mallory appears to have turned crooked, but he finally demonstrates his honesty--first by producing enough documentary evidence to convict the cartel of fraud and then by blowing up the partly finished city hall to demonstrate its substandard construction.
Review Excerpt
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The Architecture of Vanity
In the pantheon of silent-era morality plays, few films dissect the fragility of the masculine ego with such surgical precision as 1925's Flattery. Directed with a keen eye for social stratification, the film introduces us to Reginald Mallory, portrayed by John Bowers with a nuanced blend of earnestness and oblivious narcissism. Mallory is not a villain in the traditional sense; rather, he is a man whose internal compass has been demagnetized by a l..."
