Summary
Carthage’s railroad king, John Ladd, has sculpted his mansion into a mausoleum of anticipation: every silver setting, every hothouse camellia, waits for the heartbeat of Phyllis, his motherless daughter, to detonate the silence. When she escapes to Washington’s marble salons, the debutante finds only gilded cages and suitors who rattle like porcelain; she flees back to the whistle-stop lights where greasepaint ghosts prowl. One matinee afternoon the traveling road-show unfurls like a crimson banner: Cyril Adair, matinée idol by trade, poet of self-ruin by instinct, steps into the footlights and brands her retinas. A single invitation to tea—cream trembling on Spode, the scent of tuberoses wilting—becomes a courtship conducted in half-truths; the actor’s discarded mistress, a Fury in ostrich plumes, spills the secret to the railroad baron, who roars injunctions across long-distance wires. Yet Phyllis, drunk on her own audacity, elopes with the intoxicated thespian under a sky hemorrhaging meteors. Marriage reveals the backstage truth: Cyril’s pockets are lined with empty gin flasks, his contracts evaporate whenever Ladd’s locomotive fortune whistles into theatrical offices. Still, Phyllis—equal parts Penelope and Pygmalion—stitches curtains, learns lines, sobers her prince with stubborn sunrise kisses. When paternal bribes fail, the titan capitulates, bankrolls Cyril’s starring vehicle, and the curtain rises on a fragile, glittering reconciliation that tastes of salt, greasepaint, and second chances.
Synopsis
Motherless Phyllis Ladd runs the household of her father John, a railroad president, who loves her but dreads the day that she will marry and leave. To make her social debut, Phyllis leaves her hometown of Carthage and accepts the invitation of Mrs. Fenshaw, a Washington social matron, to live with her. Phyllis soon tires of the stuffy life and boring suitors and returns. At a matinee road-show performance, Phyllis becomes infatuated with actor Cyril Adair. When she invites him for tea, the vain actor accepts, hoping to seduce her. After more meetings, Cyril's discarded lover informs Ladd, who demands that the romance cease. Phyllis elopes with Cyril, who, touched by her devotion, marries her. Although their life is plagued by Cyril's alcoholism, firings and inability to get new roles because Ladd influences theater managers to reject him, Phyllis patiently tries to bring out the best in her husband. When Phyllis and Cyril refuse Ladd's bribes to end the marriage, Ladd relents, backs a show in which Cyril is to star and is reconciled with the couple.
Review Excerpt
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A nitrate prayer flares across the screen: the title card blooms in sun-gold tinting, and already the audience of 1925 senses that Infatuation will not sermonize like other moral tales of the decade. Instead, it pirouettes on the knife-edge between velvet respectability and brackish desire, much like the locomotives that thunder through John Ladd’s iron empire—promising escape, threatening derailment.
A Railroad Mansion as Emotional Fortress
Director Harry A. Pollard—who later steered the sens..."
