Summary
A soot-smudged six-year-old, Sadie O’Malley, hears settlement-worker sermons that transmute tenement alleyways into Jacob’s-ladder daydreams; when a midnight-blue limousine idles beside the laundry, her child-mind transfigures it into a celestial chariot. She wriggles inside with her mongrel George Washington Square, and the basket—an unwitting ark—slides down a mahogany chute into the Versailles-scaled mausoleum of absent Mrs. Welland Riche. Marble corridors echo with harp-string sunlight; Sadie believes she has reached the pearly gates. Servants, mistaking the waif for another of their employer’s ornamental whims, dress her in lace salvaged from Parisian salons. The mansion’s mirrored halls refract a thousand Sadies, each more cherubic than the last. Yet when the rightful mistress returns, paradise calcifies into contract: the dog must vanish, replaced by pedigreed Poms. Sadie’s refusal is a whispered revolution; she clutches George Washington Square like a relic and descends the front steps, telling her frantic mother that heaven rejected them for bad pedigree.
Synopsis
Little six-year-old Sadie O'Malley, a child of the tenement district, has a vision of heaven awakened within her by the teaching of a settlement worker, so when she sees a handsome limousine in front of the settlement laundry near her home she thinks it is a heavenly chariot, climbs into a clothes hamper in the interior of the car and is whisked away to the home of Mrs. Welland Riche. The latter has left earlier in the day on a trip, so when Sadie and. her dog, George Washington Square, who has been her companion in the hamper trip, are dumped down the clothes chute of the Riche home while concealed in the basket, they find easy access to the upper regions of the mansion and then, indeed, Sadie thinks she is in heaven. Sadie soon is discovered by the servants, but they believe she is just another of Mrs. Riche's fads when she tells them she is there to stay. Believing Mrs. Riche as desiring that the best of care be given the child, Sadie is dressed in rich garments and is much at home until Mrs. Riche returns. While the servants' explanations have been made, Mrs. Riche, in the meantime having been won over by the child's beauty and sweet manners, decides Sadie may remain. But the tenement child's happiness is short-lived when George Washington Square appears upon the scene. Mrs. Riche orders that the pup be removed and tells Sadie that, instead, she can play with the Riche collection of Poms. Not so for Sadie. She informs the wealthy matron that she wouldn't give up George Washington Square for all the heavens and that if G.W.S. cannot remain she will go. So hugging her doggie close to her she returns to her worried mother with the explanation, "I have been to heaven, but they sent me home because they didn't like my dog."
Review Excerpt
"
Heaven, it turns out, smells of starch and gasoline.
A hamper of freshly ironed linens becomes the portal through which Sadie O’Malley—street-urchin theologian—pilots her scruffy dog toward a mansion she mistakes for the New Jerusalem. Dana Burnet’s 1920 scenario, filmed with candle-flutter delicacy by an unheralded ensemble, is less sentimental fable than class-war psalm sung in the key of childhood. The limousine that ferries Sadie uptown is both golden calf and Trojan horse; the chute down w..."
