Summary
On sun-scorched granite above the Corsican maquis, a single pistol-crack ricochets through Mr. Barnes’s gilded idyll, turning the American financier into an unwilling custodian of a blood-feud that will chase him from clifftop to salon, from Parisian varnish to the salt-glitter of the Promenade des Anglais. A dying Paoli stains the limestone; his sister Marina, eyes like obsidian knives, dips her brush in that same crimson memory and transmutes vendetta into pigment, exhibiting the duel on canvas where Barnes—seeking nothing more than a refuge from ticker-tape tedium—recognizes the engraved name “Gerard Anstruther” shining from the painted pistol like an omen. The trail drifts to the Côte d’Azur: Barnes shadows Enid Anstruther, Gerard’s luminous cousin, through roulette haze and mimosa dusk, discovering that the presumed killer courts the avenging artist under the cynical patronage of Count Danella, a puppet-master who covets Marina’s dowry and secrets. In a ballroom lit by champagne-crystal, Marina is goaded toward marriage with the very man she has sworn to destroy; Barnes, torn between prudence and the vertigo of desire, unpicks the conspiracy—Gerard’s weapon was borrowed, the actual murderer a repentant lieutenant whose confession arrives on the edge of a second dawn. Danella’s machinations collapse in a mistaking of silhouettes: Tomasso’s blade finds the count instead of the English officer, vendetta devours its architect, and Barnes—no longer a mere spectator of Old-World grudges—claims both truth and Marina as spoils of a moral battlefield he never meant to enter.
Synopsis
While vacationing in Corsica, Mr. Barnes of New York witnesses a duel between Paoli and a British naval officer, in which the Corsican is killed. Marina, Paoli's sister, vows a vendetta against the slayer, but the only clue to his identity is the name "Gerard Anstruther" engraved on his pistol. In an art gallery in Paris, Mr. Barnes sees a picture, painted by Marina, of the duel scene, and his interest brings him under suspicion. Barnes later meets Enid Anstruther, an English girl who admires the painting, and he follows her to Nice. There he discovers that Gerard, who is Paoli's murderer, wishes to marry Marina. Her guardian, Count Danella, plots to have Marina wed Gerard, then reveals to her that he is the killer of her brother; Barnes, however, proves that Gerard lent his pistol to a fellow officer who later confessed to the slaying. The count, defeated in his scheme, is killed by Tomasso, who mistakes him for Gerard; and the lovers are happily united.
Review Excerpt
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There is a moment—halfway through Archibald Clavering Gunter’s labyrinthine tale as stitched into celluloid by director Tom Moore—when the camera simply lingers on Naomi Childers’s Marina as she layers vermilion onto canvas, the pigment so thick it catches the Parisian gaslight like molten ore. In that suspended heartbeat, the entire ethos of Mr. Barnes of New York reveals itself: silent-era cinema as chiaroscuro, guilt and desire daubed in textures you could almost scrape with a palette knife...."
