Her Country First

In the sepia-toned autumn of 1917, when the world still smelled of cordite and lilacs, Dorothy Grant—silk-stocking heiress with a mind like a searchlight—descends from her finishing-school aerie to the clamorous heart of home-front America. She does not return with embroidery samplers but with a manifesto: a girls-only airborne phalanx, crisp-caped, puttee-wrapped, ready to out-maneuver the Kaiser in his own sky. Overnight, the parquet ballroom becomes a parade ground; a grizzled Spanish-American vet, smelling of rum and nostalgia, barks cadence against the grand piano. Daddy, whose factory stamps out death in brass casings, whispers paranoia about saboteurs lurking behind every silver platter. Dorothy, drunk on her own semaphore innocence, pins scarlet guilt on the dignified butler whose only crime is bisecting citrus with surgical eccentricity. Yet the true vipers coil closer: patent-leather acquaintances whose smiles click like safes, whose questions about after-hours passwords are velvet-sheathed stilettos. When the night watchman’s key finally dangles between her naïveté and their dynamite, the film tilts from drawing-room whimsy into incendiary noir, and Dorothy must decide whether the greatest casualty of war is not steel or flesh but the fragile lattice of trust.