Summary
A reel of nitrate trembling with the pulse of 1918, From Two to Six detonates the polite drawing-room farce and lets the shrapnel of modernity whistle through its gilded corridors. John Stevens, a laconic Edison in a trench-coat, forges a sonic torpedo-detector that could shorten the Atlantic slaughter; before the ink dries, Baron von Wiederholtz—part wolf, part chandelier—siphons the blueprints into a leather map-case while Madame Elsa, a Mata-Haricot in silk georgette, ghosts behind him like a green-eyed exhalation of smoke. They bolt from foggy Washington to Manhattan’s Hotel Excelsior, a Beaux-Arts hive where bellboys speak five languages and every keyhole has a moral opinion. Alice Stevens, the inventor’s hawk-boned daughter, hurtles after them in a commandeered ambulance, her hair uncoiling like a battle standard. Inside the same brass-plated hive, Howard Skeele—gangly heir to a railroad dynasty—has been cornered by the matrimonial arithmetic of two family empires: marry childhood playmate Margaret Worth before the courthouse clock strikes six, or be exiled to genteel poverty. The corridors become a labyrinth of slamming doors, mirrored walls, and synchronised pocket-watches; Howard, hiding from a dowager posse, tumbles through a fretwork panel into the Baron’s lair just as the spy secrets the plans inside a hollowed-out Gutenberg. A glance, a gaslight flicker, and the chase re-routes: Alice storms the suite, retrieves the schematics, but finds her exit barred by the ticking six-o’clock deadline. Capital and carnage fuse: she and Howard barter matrimony for freedom, wed in the hotel’s candle-scarred chapel while Margaret, radiant with renunciation, releases her claim. The spies are clapped in irons by a Secret Service agent disguised as a pastry cook; the blueprint rolls, now freckled with rice-confetti, is cradled by a bride who has learned that invention and inheritance are equally volatile explosives.
Synopsis
During World War I, John Stevens invents an anti-submarine device, but the plans are stolen by two German spies, the Baron von Wiederholtz and Madame Elsa, who flee to a New York hotel. Stevens' daughter Alice pursues the spies hoping to retrieve the plans. Also lodging at the hotel are Howard Skeele and Margaret Worth, childhood friends whose parents are forcing them to marry with threats of disinheritance. In attempting to escape, Howard finds himself in the baron's suite just in time to spy the German in the act of hiding the plans. Howard directs Alice to the plans, and then, because he must be wed before six o'clock that evening or lose his inheritance, he proposes to her. They marry with Margaret's blessing, the spies are arrested, and Alice returns home with the plans and a husband.
Review Excerpt
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The first shock: the film is only 52 minutes long, yet it metabolises like a season of television condensed into a single, volatile shot of ether. From the opening iris-in on a Potomac munitions lab—its windows rattling to distant artillery—Arthur Stringer’s screenplay refuses the languid table-setting of contemporaries like The Silence of Dean Maitland. Instead, a title card slams forward in sans-serif panic: “The war waits for no man’s signature.” Already, the syntax of melodrama is being re..."
