Summary
Harvey, a town whose very name trembles on the tongue like a half-forgotten psalm, watches its brightest star, Laura Nesbit—daughter of the stoic physician whose beard smells forever of ether and winter—tease the affections of two antipodal men: Grant Adams, ink-stained idealist whose editorials bleed for the working soul, and Tom VanDorn, the silk-vested attorney who kisses with the cold calculation of a contract. One summer evening of fireflies and lemonade she flirts with VanDorn merely to prod Grant’s jealousy; the plan ricochets, shattering hearts like crystal hurled against flagstones. Grant, wounded, seeks solace in the opium of Margaret Muller’s arms—Margaret whose laughter is a cracked bell, whose reputation clings to her like the scent of jasmine and scandal. From their clandestine furnace a son is forged, a secret ember. Rebounding, Laura marries the ambitious lawyer; Margaret, cornered by circumstance, weds the diffident barrister Henry Fenn. Years elapse in a danse macabre of mirrored betrayals: VanDorn, now councilor and cad, pursues Margaret with the same rapacious hunger he once lavished on jurisprudence; the two households collapse like card castles in a gale. Meanwhile Grant, disillusioned with the Fourth Estate, descends into the subterranean gloom of the mines, trading paragraphs for pickaxes until an explosion of subterranean thunder tattoos his flesh with grief and soot. Dragged half-dead to the Nesbit manse, he is nursed by Laura—her touch a benediction, her eyes twin censers of contrition. Just as reconciliation glimmers, a striker’s bullet finds Grant’s small, illegitimate boy on the cindered street; the child’s death knell reverberates through every cloistered heart. Grief-crazed, Grant confesses paternity to Laura amid salt and ashes; she, forged anew by sorrow, forgives. Together they walk into the uncertain dawn, carrying the fragile covenant that love, though scarred, may yet beat its wings.
Synopsis
Laura Nesbit, daughter of old Dr. Nesbit and belle of the younger social set in the town of Harvey, plans to marry Grant Adams, the editor of the local paper, until she flirts with rising but unethical lawyer Tom VanDorn to arouse her beau's jealousy. A saddened Grant is drawn into an affair with town siren Margaret Muller, with whom he has an illegitimate son. On the rebound, Laura marries VanDorn and Margaret weds attorney Henry Fenn. History repeats itself when Laura's husband becomes infatuated with Margaret, which breaks up both marriages. Meanwhile, Grant has given up his newspaper to become a foreman in the mines. After he is injured in an explosion, Grant is taken to the Nesbit home, where Laura's care restores his health. When Grant's little son is shot and killed during a strike, he becomes so overwrought with grief that he confesses the boy's parentage to Laura, who forgives his past and they begin a new life together.
Review Excerpt
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There is a moment—wordless, of course, because this is 1920—when Laura Nesbit’s lace curtain drifts back into place like the final breath of a dying era, and the whole moral architecture of Harvey, Kansas, seems to sag. William Allen White, the celebrated Emporia editor, claimed he merely gave Lillian Ducey his newspaper clippings; what reaches the screen is something nearer to a bloodletting, a small-town vivisection under the scalpel of celluloid.
Director Herbert Blaché, never shy about tr..."
