Summary
A luminous parlor-comet of 1922, Glass Houses detonates the sentimental clichés of the era by smuggling a razor-sharp satire of class camouflage inside a featherweight farce. When the orphaned Duval sisters—penniless yet piquant—descend from chandeliers to chiffon aprons, Joy dons the mask of a drab, Bible-quoting drudge to infiltrate the over-upholstered world of Aunt Harriet, a matriarch who collects causes the way others collect porcelain pugs. The ostensible quarry is Billy Norton, Harriet’s polo-lounging nephew, whose vices run no deeper than gin rickeys and foxtrot fatigue. A moonlit mishap in the marbled garage of a grand-aunt’s estate strands Joy and Billy in parallel solitude; dawn’s gossip engine proclaims an elopement that never was, forcing the two into a marriage that neither sought yet both secretly covet. Once the veil of spinsterish gray is lifted, Joy emerges as a swan-necked sylph in lamé, turning Billy from captive to conspirator. The plot pirouettes into mistaken-identity pandemonium when Joy’s newly minted glamour is swapped, in the public retina, for the mug-shot visage of “Angel Face Ann,” a Jazz-Age bandit queen who could swipe the pearls off a duchess while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The film climaxes in a champagne-spray of reversals: the real Angel Face is cornered in a boudoir stake-out, the faux-delinquent newlyweds pocket both absolution and affection, and the gilded household discovers that its smoothest silver can still reflect a grin.
Synopsis
When Joy Duval and her sister, Cicily, lose their inheritance and are faced with the necessity of working, Joy applies at an employment agency disguised as a prim old-fashioned working girl and is hired by Aunt Harriet as a companion. She is primarily concerned with the reform of Billy Norton, Harriet's nephew. The young couple are discovered in the garage of a wealthy relative, where they spend the night unaware of each other's presence; and it is assumed that they have eloped. Harriet is delighted when they are married, and Billy is happy to find that his wife is actually a chic beauty. Through a misunderstanding, his wife is mistaken for Angel Face Ann, a notorious thief, but all ends well when the real lady crook is captured.
