Summary
A gilded Edwardian butterfly courts a limelight-drunk moth; their wings fuse in matrimony, hatch a fragile cocoon of a child, then shear apart. He—John Heppell, velvet-clad entropy—retreats to champagne labyrinths, leaving Diana Laska, once the West End’s incandescent aria, to smolder in nursery dusk. She bolts, trailing sparks across Europe on the arm of Philip Goodier, a cad sculpted from cigarette smoke and absinthe. Continents blur into a fever dream of casinos, boudoirs, and whispers until even Goodier’s ardor rots. Diana, now a continental legend of scandal, wakes in a crimson dawn of self-revolt, craving the one mirror unbroken by her reflection: the daughter she abandoned. But society’s portcullis clangs shut; Heppell’s new wife, porcelain and pitiless, bars the door. A suicide drift toward the Thames is intercepted by Doctor Maxwell, a quiet cartographer of second chances who bargains her back into the very household she once ornamented—this time as a ghost in governess gabardine. Within those walls she discovers her grown daughter betrothed to Goodier, the man who discarded her like a cracked mask. To cauterize the bloodline, Diana swallows her name, her past, her future, and exiles herself once more—yet in that act of vanishing she finally materializes, a saint carved out of shame.
Synopsis
John Heppell, a wealthy young man about town, falls in love with Diana Laska, a noted actress, and marries her. After their child is born he tires of her and goes back to his old way of living. Infuriated at his neglect, Diana leaves him and goes abroad with Philip Goodier. He also tires of her in time, and she becomes a notorious character on the continent. Finally she awakens to the evil of her life and tries to reform. She finds her path strewn with thorns as the world holds her for what she has been. A longing is kindled in her heart for her daughter. Her first husband has remarried and refuses to permit her to see her. Sick of life, she attempts suicide. She is attended by Doctor Maxwell. He instills hope into her by promising to aid her in her attempt to see her daughter. Maxwell is an old friend of Heppell and partly by persuasion and partly by threats Diana Laska is received into the Heppell home as the governess for Heppell's son by his second wife. She meets her daughter only to find that she is engaged to Philip Goodier, the man who had cast her off. Horrified, she tells the Heppells her daughter must not marry him. Goodier denounces Diana, while admitting his relations with her, but cannot understand why she should have an influence over the Heppells. Finally, Diana tells him that the girl to whom he is engaged is her daughter. He consents to break the engagement only on condition that she leave the house and never see her daughter again. The woman who has developed under Doctor Maxwell's influence, then makes the supreme sacrifice of giving up her daughter to save her from her own shame. And through this sacrifice she wins atonement for her sins.
Review Excerpt
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Charles Brabin’s That Sort (1914) arrives like a tarnished locket fished from the mud of pre-Hays-Code cinema—its hinge still clicks, its portraits still blink back at us, water-stained yet recognizable. The film is only five reels, but every celluloid inch throbs with the migraine of a woman who once believed the spotlight could double as sanctuary. Basil Macdonald Hastings’s scenario, adapted from his own stage success, refuses the moral spoon-feeding that would soon ossify into Hollywood con..."
