Summary
Shot through with the brittle champagne fizz of mid-twenties collegiate society, Nobody’s Fool traces the arc of Polly Gordon—plain of face, threadbare of purse—who, one frost-bitten autumn evening, is carted off to a gilded campus ball as the expendable pawn in a frat-house hazing. The eligible Vincent DePuyster, all patent-leather arrogance, expects to deposit her at the punch-bowl and vanish; instead the camera lingers on her half-moon eyes as the orchestra scrapes out a waltz, recording every quiver of mortified longing. Months later a telegraph detonates her life: a half-million dollar bequest from a forgotten aunt. Overnight, the mirror refuses to change, yet the world pirouettes—suitors sprout like mildew, their bouquets clogging her narrow boarding-house corridor. Disgust calcifies into armor; she greets each suitor with a gaze that could frost gin. Enter Mary, once a confidante, now the pampered wife of Dr. Hardy, who spirits Polly to a pine-choked Catskill sanitarium where the air smells of tannin and old sermons. There she collides with Artemis Alger, a reclusive novelist fleeing a cacophony of stage-door johnnies; he wears solitude like an overcoat and distrusts any woman who smiles too readily. Their first conversation is a duel of aphorisms across a library table—her cynicism against his misogynist romanticism—until laughter cleaves the stalemate. Snow muffles the estate, Alger’s typewriter falls silent, and affection grows like lichen: slow, oblique, tenacious. But Vincent, stung by conscience or vanity, arrives with an adolescent’s swagger and a man’s hunger, brandishing old letters and fresh promises. A midwinter storm slams the mountainside; roads wash out, lanterns gutter, and in the candle-lit hush of the lodge Hardy and Mary reappear, bringing diagnoses, match-making schemes, and the film’s moral barometer. When dawn pries open the sky, every mask lies discarded on the fir-strewn floor: Polly’s fortune is neither curse nor salvation, merely a spotlight on appetites; Alger’s hermit pose is punctured by the simplest of needs—to be seen without artifice; Vincent’s charm is revealed as the thinnest of gilt. The final tableau—three figures at the station, steam plumes ghosting the air—offers no triumphal clinch, only the fragile equipoise of people who have learned to distrust the obvious.
Synopsis
Unattractive and poor Polly Gordon is taken to the college dance by eligible Vincent DePuyster only as part of a fraternity initiation. Suitors flock to her, however, when she inherits half a million dollars from her aunt, but she grows cynical and dismisses them. Her friend Mary, now married to Dr. Hardy, suggests a retreat to the mountains; there she meets author Artemis Alger, who is seeking to escape from women. After an initial clash, Alger comes to love her but finds a rival in young DePuyster. After further complications, Hardy and Mary arrive in a storm, and matters are cleared up.
Review Excerpt
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The first time we see Polly Gordon she is framed against a dormitory window whose panes blister with November rain, her silhouette swallowed by the anemic glow of a single gas-jet. Poverty is rarely photogenic in silent cinema, yet cinematographer Harry Myers (pulling double duty as the tipsy doctor here) drapes shadows across Lydia Yeamans Titus’s cheekbones with such tenderness that destitution becomes a chiaroscuro aria. The camera, restless as a gossip, tracks down the corridor where soror..."
