Summary
Jack Straw, a Harlem iceman whose days are spent carving frozen blocks and whose nights echo with the siren song of Ethel Parker Jennings drifting down a rusted dumb-waiter shaft, hears in that disembodied soprano the promise of a world beyond ice and sweat. When the Jennings clan strike West-Coast oil and trade tenement shadows for Pacific sunlight, Jack’s heart hitches a ride, melting its way across the continent. In Los Angeles he trades tongs for trays, slipping into starched linen at a Wilshire ballroom where resentment ferments like bad burgundy. Enter Holland—scion of slighted society, nursing a vendetta against Ethel’s haughty mother—who spies in the gu waiter’s chiseled cheekbones a passport to revenge: pass off the prole as the Archduke of Pomerania, let the dowager swoon, then watch her crumble. Jack, intoxicated by proximity to his unseen songbird, agrees; the masquerade becomes a gilded cage where class is costume and love the only genuine article. Under crystal chandeliers he waltzes through drawing-rooms, a frost-bitten poet learning the syntax of champagne flutes and fork placement, while Ethel—luminous, unguarded—falls for the man she believes royalty. Holland’s conscience, that fickle lodger, eventually cries foul; the unmasking detonates like a champagne cork, sending Jack back to the alleyways of his former life. Yet fate, ever the ironist, dispatches the true Pomeranian envoy, whose corroboration rewrites Jack from pariah to prince. Mrs. Jennings pivots on her ostrich-feather heels, announcing an engagement that began as whispered notes in a Harlem shaft and ends in a sunlit California garden—proof that in the carnival of American reinvention, even a man who once sold 25-cent cubes can purchase a throne of pure, improbable love.
Synopsis
Jack Straw, an iceman, falls in love with the voice of Ethel Parker Jennings which he is accustomed to hearing down the dumbwaiter shaft of his Harlem flat. When the Jennings family acquires wealth through an oil investment, they move to California and Jack follows. Finding employment as a waiter, Jack meets Holland, who holds a grudge against the snobbish Mrs. Jennings. Holland enlists Jack in a scheme to humiliate the haughty woman by persuading the waiter to impersonate the Archduke of Pomerania. Jack consents, seizing upon the opportunity to be near Ethel, and during Jack's stay with the Jennings, the couple fall in love. Eventually Holland decides that the joke has gone too far and unmasks Jack. Mrs. Jennings expels Jack from the house, but when the real ambassador from Pomerania appears and documents Jack's authenticity, she recants and announces Ethel's engagement to the archduke waiter.
Review Excerpt
"
The first image we see is a block of ice sweating under a July sun, and already the film has told us everything: permanence is illusion, class is a thawing facade, and desire drips faster than any freezer can keep up. Jack Straw—title and man—arrives onscreen like a shard of that ice, jagged, glistening, destined to melt into something unrecognizably beautiful.
There is, of course, precedent for the social-swapped fairy tale: Tony America flirted with imposture, and The Pillory wore its class..."
