Summary
Across a continent unspooling like a reel of silver nitrate, Red, White and Blue Blood stitches three acts of salvation into one vertiginous waltz of desire and disillusionment. A lone cowboy-errant, John Spaulding, erupts from the sagebrush like a chromatic anomaly, foiling a locomotive heist that threatens the silk-draped futures of Helen Molloy-Smythe and her nouveau-riche mother; their private railroad car becomes a roving opera box where class is both costume and cage. Months later, the same hero materializes on the manicured littoral of Long Island—Gatsby before Gatsby—plucking Helen from a moonlit riptide that wants to swallow her in sequined froth. Each rescue intensifies the erotic static between them, yet rumor brands Helen a heartless flirt spinning suitors like roulette wheels. Wounded vanity masquerading as moral pedagogy, John schemes a public humiliation to chasten her. Helen, sensing the trap, counters by affixing herself to Count Berratti, an Italian arriviste whose title is a gilded IOU. The film’s crucible arrives at a society ball where masks slip faster than champagne flutes: John intercepts yet another catastrophe—an overturned phaeton, a runaway thoroughbred, a chandelier’s suicidal plunge, choose your aristocratic cataclysm—and the third deliverance dissolves every artifice. Helen flings the Count’s cardboard coronation into the Atlantic dusk, choosing the man whose courage was never for sale. The final shot tilts skyward: fireworks bleed into the patriotic palette of the title, leaving only the afterimage of two silhouettes kissing against a flag that refuses to stay still.
Synopsis
John Spaulding saves Helen Molloy-Smythe and her mother, who has recently acquired great wealth, from a train robbery while they are on vacation out West. Some time later, John returns to his father's country estate on Long Island and again saves Helen when she almost drowns. The two fall in love, but when John learns that Helen has a reputation as a society coquette, he plans to teach her a lesson in humility. Learning of his plan, Helen retaliates by accepting the proposal of the fortune-hunting Count Berratti. All ends happily, however, when John saves Helen for a third time and she trades the count's proposal for his.
