Summary
A bourgeois everyman, Lloyd Norwood, is lured from his parquet-floored respectability into the sulphurous glow of basement gin-joints by Goldie Lewis, a moll whose laughter crackles like cellophane round forbidden fruit; under her neon gaze he gambles away cufflinks, honour, and finally identity, until the corpse of Joe the Swell—throat slashed by moonlight on a wharf—lands at his feet. Enter Mary, the frigidly luminous wife, who re-stitches the torn fabric of marriage by unpicking herself: she powders her skin chalk-white, pencils her mouth into a Cupid’s bow of venom, and slips into speakeasy shadows as ‘Lilith,’ a phantom of vengeance. With a cigarette ember for a lantern she leads Pussyfoot Connor—syphilitic braggart, killer, and spiritualist—into a mirrored labyrinth where guilt itself turns carnivorous, coaxing a confession that echoes like a ricochet. In a final coup de théâtre she invites the city’s frost-blooded kingpin, Jack Frost, to a midnight supper, setting jealous daggers singing through smoke; Connor barges in, accusation spit-flecked, and the bulls sweep the joint, cuffs glinting like snowfall. One trunk-call later, Lloyd walks free into winter dawn, chastened, reborn, and newly able to read danger in the glint of a stranger’s smile.
Synopsis
When respectable Lloyd Norwood becomes infatuated with moll Goldie Lewis, he falls into a life of debasement that results in his being accused of the murder of gangland henchman Joe the Swell. Norwood's wife Mary, convinced of her husband's innocence, determines to clear his name. Disguising herself as a vamp and infiltrating the underworld, Mary extracts a confession from the real murderer, Pussyfoot Connor, whom she dupes into believing that he sees the ghost of the murdered man. Later, to have witnesses to the story, Mary takes a midnight dinner with gang leader Jack Frost, arousing the jealousy of Connor, who enters and accuses Frost of instigating the murder. The police, alerted to the scheme, rush in and arrest the criminals. Finally, a phone call to the prison warden results in Norwood's release as a wiser man.
