Summary
A bacchanalian fever-dream in marble and moonlight, the film opens on Jackson Harber’s Xanadu of gilded domes and perfumed labyrinths where champagne cataracts spill over alabaster balustrades. His betrothed, Mary—a mannequin of porcelain allure—floats through corridors of peacock fans and narcotic jazz, her engagement ring a manacle of diamonds. From Cambridge arrives Eduard, trailing a cassocked tutor who sniffs sulfur in every saxophone riff. The sculptor Harry Lighton, chisel still warm from marble thighs, pleads for Mary’s escape; rejected, he turns the gun on himself, the bullet carving a red comma across the white page of his chest. Mary collapses into a dream that detonates history: she becomes Lot’s restless wife, slipping from salt-crusted sheets into the incense-choked temples of Astarte where priests bruise bodies into prayer. An androgynous angel with eyes like extinguished stars herds the reluctant couple from a city already cracking along its fault lines of vice. At the threshold of annihilation she glances back—curiosity sharper than brimstone—and petrifies into a crystalline effigy. The dream’s salt crust still clinging to her lashes, Mary awakens, flees the orgiastic masque, and races through dawn-streaked streets toward the hospital where Harry’s pulse flickers like a candle in an abattoir.
Synopsis
When the old multimillionaire Jackson Harber wants to marry the young model Mary, she hesitates, but her mother convinces her that this is her chance to lead a life in luxury and leisure. The engagement is celebrated with an extravagant party at his estate, which is a gigantic palace and park in oriental style. His son Eduard arrives from Cambridge, accompanied by a priest, who is his tutor. The priest is disgusted by the bacchanalian reveling and womanizing going on everywhere. Mary's adorer, the sculptor Harry Lighton, tries to convince her to break the engagement. When she refuses, he shoots himself and is seriously injured. Mary falls asleep and is transported in her dream to the Biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the dream she sees herself as the wife of Lot, leaving her husband to play a central role in the excessive rites of the goddess Astarte. An angel arrives and leads Lot and his wife out of Sodom, just when the city starts to collapse. Lot's wife cannot resist looking back, and is because of her disobedience converted into a pillar of salt. The dream opens the eyes of Mary, and when she wakens, she leaves the party and hastens to Harry in the hospital.
