Enid Gregory plays the piano at a music store on Broadway and is content with her snappy, routine existence until Janet Fenwick, a society girl whose father committed suicide under a cloud of financial disgrace, comes to Enid's boarding-house. Enid gets Janet a job, and Janet teaches Enid society manners, awakening her ambition; and Enid's interest turns from Billy to Kent Lloyd, whom she meets on a beach outing.
Broadway’s glow has rarely crackled onscreen with such phosphorescent desperation as in Playing with Fire, a 1921 melodrama that chooses combustion—literal and figurative—over polite smolder. Forgotten for a century, the film now re-emerges from nitrate purgatory, its tinting so fever-bright you can almost smell the ...
Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.
Dallas M. Fitzgerald
Charley Chase
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" Broadway’s glow has rarely crackled onscreen with such phosphorescent desperation as in Playing with Fire, a 1921 melodrama that chooses combustion—literal and figurative—over polite smolder. Forgotten for a century, the film now re-emerges from nitrate purgatory, its tinting so fever-bright you can almost smell the shellac on the theater seats. Director Dallas M. Fitzgerald, a name unjustly sidelined in chronicles of the teens and twenties, orchestrates class collision like a man juggling nit..."
Harold Miller
William M. Clayton, J.U. Giesy, Doris Schroeder
United States
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