Summary
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.
Synopsis
During World War I, young Dorothy Grant comes home from finishing school and informs her parents that she is going to contribute to the war effort by organizing a "Girls Aviation Corps". She has uniforms made and hires a veteran of the Spanish-American War to teach her "cadets" military routines and drills. Her father owns a munitions factory and is always telling her to be on the lookout for spies. She convinces herself that the family butler, Williams, is a spy because he cuts his grapefruit in an odd way. It turns out that Williams isn't a spy but the people whom Dorothy least suspects are in fact spies, and they discover that Dorothy knows the password to get into the factory after hours. They come up with a plan to get Dorothy to give them the password so they can blow up the factory.
Director
