Summary
A muscular parable of velvet-gloved class warfare, The Better Man hurls two clergymen—one carved from East-Side cobblestones, the other from Mayfair mahogany—into a matrimonial duel that detonates across Manhattan’s sacred and mercantile towers. Rev. Mark Stebbing, fists still raw from boyhood dock fights, barges into Margaret Wharton’s gilded orbit trailing the smoke of mission-house sermons; opposite him glides Rev. Lionel Barmore, whose vowels smell of old coin and whose smile could auction a cathedral. One pulpit waits in a rag-picker’s parish where hymnals are patched with newsprint; the other perches in a limestone megachana whose stained glass cost more than the adjoining borough. Stebbing lunges at the former, gambling that sacrificial proximity to squalor will sanctify his marriage proposal; Barmore coolly claims the latter, confident that opulence itself is a kind of ordination. On the same frost-bitten dusk both men kneel to Margaret—one on cracked linoleum, one on Persian silk—and her gloved hand drifts toward the silk. Yet the betrothal fireworks are eclipsed by darker gunpowder: Margaret’s steel-baron father, a titan who greets labor organizers with Pinkerton clubs, provokes his furnace-tempered workers into a plot to dynamite the plant during the engagement gala, ensuring the heiress becomes collateral shrapnel. Between Stebbing’s midnight rescue through catwalks of fire and Barmore’s candlelit sermon on the inviolability of private property, the film asks which suitor—scarred apostle or perfumed patrician—deserves the epitaph “the better man.”
Synopsis
Rev. Mark Stebbing, a tough, up-from-the-streets kind of guy, finds himself in competition for the affections of pretty Margaret Wharton with Rev. Lionel Barmore, a suave, polished aristocrat. When a poor church and a wealthy one both need new pastors, Stebbing volunteers to go to the poor one, while Barmore requests--and gets--the rich one. When both men propose to Margaret on the same day, she accepts Barmore. Meanwhile, Margaret's father--a wealthy industrialist--is having labor problems at his plant, and angers his workers so much that they plot to blow up the plant--with Margaret inside.
Review Excerpt
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Picture, if you can, a Manhattan twilight painted not in bruised neon but in the tremulous mercury of 1914 nitrate: every gutter puddle becomes a molten mirror, every spire a graphite scratch against saffron sky. Into this chiaroscuro strides Reverend Mark Stebbing—collar askew, knuckles map-inked with scars—looking less like a shepherd than a stevedore who mugged a seminary. Robert Broderick plays him with the forward lean of a man forever walking into headwind, his eyes two struck matches th..."
