Summary
Philip Dorset, a bruised magnate whose matrimony imploded when he learned his bride’s heart beat only for his vault, flees the gilded ash of Newport for the arterial green of equatorial Africa, hoping the continent’s drum-roll of cicadas will drown the echo of forged vows. Instead of forgetting, he collides with a rowdy caravanserai of American circus men—trick-riders, canvas-duelists, and one pachyderm-whisperer short after a rogue tusker flattened their last trainer. Dorset, buying his absolution with a bullwhip and a checkbook, becomes the troupe’s elephant maestro, steering gray leviathans through mahogany dusk toward a village where missionaries recently turned to martyrs. There he finds Joan, a moon-pale child swaddled in python shadows and Anglican hymns, her father’s Bible still warm with unprayed prayers. The circus adopts her like a living curio; she crosses the Atlantic in a cage of timbers and starlight, metamorphosing into a sylph who pirouettes on cantering thoroughbreds while the Big Top exhales sawdust galaxies. Years distill into a quiet ache: Dorset, branded once by a mercenary spouse, treats Joan’s luminous devotion like a lit fuse, retreating into a self-made exile the moment he senses reciprocity. Yet the wires of fate twist—news of a divorce decree reaches him like a telegram from providence, and he gallops back just as a cyclone snaps tent-poles, looses lions, and flings trapeze rigs into constellations of sparks. Amid canvas carnage, Joan and Dorset lock eyes through rain that tastes of copper and redemption, the elephants trumpeting a requiem for every love ever doubted.
Synopsis
After discovering that his bride has married him only for his money, Philip Dorset journeys to Africa in hopes of putting the past behind him. In the jungle, he teams up with a party of American circus men on an elephant hunt. Their expeditions take them to a native village where they discover Joan, an orphaned white girl whose missionary father has recently died. The group, now enhanced by Dorset's addition as the elephant trainer, takes the waif back to America with them. Years pass and Joan becomes an accomplished bareback rider in the circus, while her affection for Dorset deepens into love. Recalling his earlier unhappy experience, Dorset tries to discourage the girl, and upon failing decides to leave the circus. Soon after his departure, he discovers that his wife has divorced him and rushes back to Joan. That night, a terrific storm strikes the circus tent and out of the cataclysm the lovers are reunited.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I saw Her Elephant Man—a 35 mm print flecked like a leopard’s coat—its very title felt like a dare. How do you sell a love story stitched to the humiliation of cuckoldry, then freight it with imperial swagger and big-top bravura? Yet this 1920 oddity, directed by the now-obscure J. S. Blackton protégé Wesley Ring, pirouettes on that tension with the reckless grace of Joan herself astride a cantering stallion.
Philip Dorset’s wound is money: specifically, the realization that his..."
