
The Battle of Love
Summary
A champagne-bright engagement ring dangles over Chicago’s smoky cabarets like a guillotine blade; beneath it, a chorus girl’s laughter—too sharp, too knowing—cuts through the tuxedoed hush. Enter the fiancé’s coterie of collegiate pranksters, their moral compass magnetized by gin and panic: they stage a lurid tableau—knife, bloodied scarf, false corpse—convincing the ingénue she has murdered the very showgirl who threatened to expose her fiancé’s past. What follows is a fever-dream of gaslit alleys, trolley bells clanging like accusations, and dawn courts where conscience pirouettes on the head of a pin. The hoax metastasizes into genuine guilt; the “dead” woman reappears like a vaudeville ghost; reputations unravel faster than a flapper’s bead necklace; yet love, obstinate as a saxophone riff, keeps swinging.
Synopsis
A young man's friends fake the murder of an interfering showgirl when she gets in the way of his impending marriage.
Ruth Stonehouse, Rapley Holmes, Thomas Commerford, Francis X. Bushman, Leo White, Helen Dunbar, Lillian Drew, Harry Dunkinson
Nancy Mann Waddel Woodrow








