Summary
Lavish corridors of Roaring-Twenties opulence echo with the hiss of a motorcycle cop’s final breath after Lydia, a champagne-bright sybarite, guns her roadster across a moonlit boulevard. Prosecutor Daniel—lover, moralist, classical scholar—unfurls a blistering philippic that yokes her reckless gaiety to Rome’s imperial rot, collapsing empire and romance in one stroke. Behind iron bars Lydia sheds her lamé skin, discovering penitence in the dim chapel glow while Daniel, the righteous architect of her sentence, drowns the grandeur of his oratory in bootleg gin, trading marble porticoes for Bowery shadows. Their mirrored descent—her ascetic rebirth, his Bacchic unraveling—turns the film into a fever chart of American guilt, a fresco where jazz-age gilt peels to reveal raw puritan bone.
Synopsis
Thrill-seeking society girl Lydia causes a motorcycle policeman's death and is prosecuted by her fiancé Daniel, who describes in lurid detail the downfall of Rome. While she's in prison, she reforms and Daniel becomes a wasted alcoholic.
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