Her Lord and Master

Transatlantic iron meets English lace when Indiana Stillwater—heiress to a continent-spanning fortune of steam, steel, and Manifest Destiny—exchanges vows with Viscount Canning, a cash-strapped aristocrat whose bloodline predates the Conquest but whose pockets jingle only with ancestral dust. The film, a brittle satinette of manners, follows Indiana from New York’s marble ballrooms to the cracked limestone of Canning Court, where the Union Jack droops beside moth-eaten tapestries. Her first sin is sartorial: she descends the grand staircase in a shirt-waist the color of unripe wheat, sleeves rolled like a dockworker, while the dowager Lady Canning inhales so sharply the candelabra flickers. Yet the clan tolerates the American incursion—until a cable arrives inviting Indiana to a Sunday-evenity family supper at the Savoy. To the Viscount, whose notion of time was calcified in 1688, a wife who dines in public on the Lord’s nominal day commits lèse-majesté against every peerage handbook ever bound in calfskin. He forbids her; she, raised on the prairie gospel of self-ownership, quietly pockets the invitation and slips out by the servants’ stair. Word ricochets through drawing rooms, card parlors, and the House of Lords itself, until the marriage becomes a parliamentary anecdote: a battlefield where Empire etiquette squares off against dollar democracy. The scandal snowballs—letters misdelivered, footmen bribed, a parlor maid dismissed for humming ‘Yankee Doodle’ while polishing the duelling pistols—until Indiana stands at dawn on Tower Wharf, steamer trunk in hand, wondering whether the Atlantic she once crossed like a ferry ride has now become a moat.