Summary
A childhood shackled by the fine print of a dead patriarch’s testament: ten-year-old Jerry Benham, already drowning in unspendable millions, is quarantined inside the baronial sprawl of the Benham estate, every female form—from scullery maid to migratory sparrow—legally airbrushed from his periphery until the far-off chime of his twenty-first birthday. A decade later the iron-willed clause has calcified into lonely ritual: dawn fishing in mirrored ponds, dusk conversations with marble busts. One mist-laced morning a gap-toothed gate, half rotted off its hinges, exhales Una Habberton onto the mossy acreage—an ungoverned girl in a muslin dress, carrying wildflowers like contraband. Their clandestine clearings become an Edenic annex christened Paradise Garden, a place of sun-dappled confessions and stolen peach juice. When Roger Canby—the estate’s avuncular majordomo—stumbles upon their symbiotic idyll, he scythes it down, dispatching Una to some anonymous elsewhere with the brisk efficiency of a gardener lopping a diseased branch. Majority Day arrives: Jerry, now twenty-one and suddenly portable, is shepherded to Manhattan by Jack Ballard, a velvet-gloved panderer who teaches him how to sign ledgers and sip champagne. The city’s phosphorescent nightscape dazzles the provincial heir; enter Marcia Van Wyck, a society orchid who weaponizes boredom, tutoring Jerry in the art of the slow-motion kiss while her pupils calculate compound interest on his future alimony. Yet phantom Una haunts every silk-lined corridor. At a rooftop bacchanal Jerry discovers Marcia and Ballard devouring each other against a marble balustrade; berserk, he hurls his mentor over the rail (the body survives, the party does not), rips Marcia’s couture gown from nape to hem, and bolts back to the estate. Roger, repentant sorcerer, conjures Una for one last reel: she materializes by the broken gate at daybreak, and the film’s final iris closes on reunited silhouettes framed in verdure.
Synopsis
Jerry Benham, the ten-year-old heir to a vast fortune, must remain on the Benham estate, where he has no contact with any female, until his twenty-first birthday, according to the will. Ten years later, while fishing, Jerry meets beautiful Una Habberton, who has wandered through a broken gate onto the estate. She returns many times to their "Paradise Garden," and an affection grows between them. However, when Jerry's kindly guardian, Roger Canby, finds them together, he sends Una away. Upon reaching twenty-one, Jerry, curious to see New York, goes there with another mentor, Jack Ballard, and is introduced to the business and society life. Despite Roger's warnings, Jerry becomes infatuated with Marcia Van Wyck, an idle-rich temptress who teaches him how to kiss, but thoughts of Una still linger. At a party, when Jerry catches Marcia kissing Ballard, he throws Ballard over a banister, thus disrupting the evening. Jerry repulses Marcia's advances, tears her dress down the back, and returns home. Roger arranges for Una to appear at the spot where they first met, and they are reconciled.
