Summary
A coral-serrated Eden, rimmed by the perfumed haze of copra smoke, rears Faith Merrill—daughter of a contraband pearl necromancer who trusts no ledger but the moonlit tide. Onto this atoll of nacre and superstition washes Dion Holme, a prodigal sculptor whose London hands once kneaded marble into psalms of flesh until Lady Cray’s venomous kiss calcified his gift. Faith, more selkie than girl, drags the half-drowned Apollo into her bamboo cloister; under the tutelage of her unblemished gaze he re-learns form, chiseling driftwood into bodies that remember desire without shame. Yet paradise exhales treachery: Jim dies, the lagoon swallows his contraband, and the virgin follows her resurrected idol to a city whose fog smells of wet soot and bruised gardenias. There, Fame—rapacious maenad—crowns Dion while Lady Cray, still stinging from rejection, schemes. She tutors Faith in absinthe labyrinths, teaches her pupils to dilate to the vertigo of opium, then looses her, sequin-clad and sylph-like, into a banquet where the girl’s narcotic danse macabre splinters Dion’s ideal. Reputation slashed, Faith flees to Limehouse where lanterns bleed vermilion onto rain-slick cobbles; opium fumes curl like ghost-lovers around her ankles. In a den of velvet shadows she expects the knife of justice, but Dion—his illusions cauterized—descends into the oriental underworld, reclaims his Galatea, and sails her back toward a horizon that promises to forget calendars.
Synopsis
Faith Merrill lives in the South Seas where she has been reared by her father Jim, a pearl-smuggling recluse who has kept his daughter completely innocent of the ways of the world. One day Faith finds Dion Holme, a sculptor who left England after a devastating love affair with Lady Cray, adrift on the beach, and brings him home. Under Faith's influence, Dion is regenerated; he begins sculpting again and returns to England, unaware of the girl's love for him. Upon her father's death, Faith follows Dion to London where he has become a famous sculptor. Lady Cray, jealous of Faith's youth and beauty, conceives a plan to destroy the girl by introducing her to a life of dissipation and drug use. Lady Cray's scheme works when at a banquet, Faith performs a risqué drug-induced dance that repulses Dion. After Lady Cray commits suicide, Faith, fearful that she will be suspected of murder, flees to the Limehouse District where she takes refuge in an opium den. Meanwhile, Dion, discovering that he loves the girl, rescues her, and they return together to the paradise of the South Seas.
Review Excerpt
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The film begins not with a title card but with a shimmer—an over-exposed shot of breakers clawing at volcanic glass, as though the camera itself were drowning. In that instant Idols of Clay announces its intent: to dissolve the membrane between documentary ethnography and feverish hallucination. Director George Fitzmaurice, ever the aesthete, treats celluloid like wet clay, smearing tonalities until the South-Seas lagoon becomes both cradle and crypt. Pearl fumes, salt rot, and the distant thro..."
