Her Mad Bargain

A bereft orphan, Alice Lambert, is hurled from the velvet-lined boudoir of her late patroness into the gutter of 1920s Manhattan, where every gilded door slams to reveal a furnace of predation behind it. Evicted by Ruth Beresford—a serpentine heiress whose jealousy drips like oxidized pearls—Alice descends the social ladder rung by rung: from dismissed mannequin to disposable muse, from canvas flesh to marble fantasy. Sculptor David Leighton, half Pygmalion, half Charon, offers a Faustian ledger: insure your pulse for thirty-five grand, sign six months away, and stage an “accidental” death so exquisite it will repay his obsession. In the hush between chisel strikes, he carves not stone but debt, immortalizing her pianist hands while secretly scripting a love letter in negative space. Meanwhile, Grant Lewis—part satyr, part tabloid ink—smears her name across parlors; a newsboy’s broken ribs become the stigmata that awakens Alice’s own pulse; and Ruth reappears as both rival and mirror, each woman clutching the same crumbling receipt of inheritance. The film’s bloodstream is a cold contract, yet every frame trembles with the illicit warmth of what happens when commerce tries to tomb art, and art answers by refusing to stay dead.