Summary
A moon-drowned fishing hamlet, half-swallowed by Atlantic fog, rears Judy—guttersnymph with salt-crusted eyelashes—under the thumb of Grandpap Ketchel, a patriarch whose Bible is a horsewhip and whose lullabies are curses. She spends her days shielding tiny Denny, the boy’s bruises blooming like indigo roses, from the fists of Jim Shuckles, a bootlegger-sheriff hybrid who already left her sister Olive’s reputation in tatters. One tempest-mad night Shuckles’ belt draws blood; Judy spirits the child to the rose-crowned cottage of the village’s unnamed benefactress, a woman who floats through rumor in veils and attar-of-roses. Shuckles, convinced he has murdered Denny, lets Judy live—his guilt a noose he tightens later when the Citizens, a star-spangled lynch-mob in three-cornered hats, elect him assassin of reformist Governor Kingsland. Over lantern-lit docks and ink-black cranberry bogs Judy eavesdrops on the plot, then enlists Teddy—governor’s heir, reared on privilege yet hungry for moral grit—to sabotage the ambush. Bullets sing; Kingsland survives; the fugitives careen back to the rose cottage where decades of buried ledgers bloom into confession: the Lady of the Roses is Ketchel’s banished daughter, Judy’s long-gone mother, and the widow of the man whose fortune Kingsland once plundered. In a single candle-gasp bloodlines knit, sins are weighed, and Judy—no longer waif but archivist of her own past—claims both heritage and future, sealing the covenant with marriage to Teddy beneath a garland of salt-stung blossoms.
Synopsis
Orphaned waif Judy, lives with Grandpap Ketchel, a cruel and often brutal man. The sole protector of little Denny, Ketchel's grandson, Judy is forced to accept the attentions of Jim Shuckles, whom she abhors and who has compromised her sister Olive. When Shuckles beats Denny, Judy hides him with the Lady of the Roses, a kind neighbor, and Shuckles, fearing that he has killed the boy, allows Judy to go unmolested. After Shuckles is elected by the Citizens, a vigilante group, to kill Governor Kingsland, Judy discovers the plot and, with the help of Teddy, the governor's son, saves his life. Seeking refuge, Judy takes the governor to her kind neighbor's house, where he confesses that the Lady of the Roses is actually Ketchel's daughter, Judy's mother, and the wife of a friend whose fortune he had stolen years before. Her family is united, Judy and Teddy marry.
Review Excerpt
"
The first time I saw Judy of Rogues' Harbor I emerged bleary-eyed at 3 a.m., convinced I’d dreamed the film myself—its nitrate ghosts flickered so insistently behind my eyelids I could taste salt and rosewater on the same tongue.
There is, in this battered 1916 five-reeler, a willingness to let cruelty and tenderness coexist inside the same frame that feels startlingly contemporary. Directors sometimes speak of “conflict” in the glib, seminar sense; here the conflict is bruise-purple, corpore..."
