Summary
A sulfurous parable of capitalism in moral freefall, Tainted Money drapes its melodrama in chiaroscuro corridors where banknotes flutter like wounded doves and every handshake secretes a stench of rust. Jane Novak’s heiress, born beneath a skylight of Tiffany glass, discovers her fortune is mortgaged to a murdered man’s last heartbeat; William V. Mong’s banker-patriarch, face a topographical map of greed, has laundered blood into stock options while Hobart Bosworth’s derelict war veteran stalks the margins, clutching a promissory note scrawled on human skin. Through rain-lashed streets, opium-scented dens, and drawing rooms where chandeliers tremble like guilty consciences, the film tracks how a single coin, passed from palm to palm, corrodes every soul it touches until the final reel erupts in a ledger-book bonfire that illuminates faces already half-devoured by shadow.
