Summary
A moonshine monarch, José Fernand, fixates on Helen Barnes—shop-girl, breadwinner, sentinel to a tubercular sister—deploying the serpentine Olive Wood as lure; the bait is a gilded weekend on a phantom yacht. Once beyond the three-mile limit, the velvet gloves peel back: the yacht becomes a trap, the horizon a locked door. Helen’s scream ricochets into the Marconi shack just as a tempest slams the sky shut; an SOS, half-drowned in static, is fired like a distress flare toward any keel that listens. The ocean answers, a liner pivots, and Jack Seville—Navy flyer, Helen’s north star—launches into squall-black air. Catastrophe outruns them all: the yacht folds like wet cardboard, the sisters and their predator wash up on a spit of volcanic sand lorded over by a misanthropic hermit who trusts neither god nor coast guard. Jack’s seaplane sputters, belly-flops into the surf, and the island—once blank—becomes a chessboard of desperation: a last knife fight between love and obsession at the edge of the world, resolved only when the liner’s siren splits the dawn.
Synopsis
José Fernand, leader of a gang of bootleggers, has designs on Helen Barnes, a shop girl who supports her delicate sister, and with the aid of Olive Wood, an adventuress, he lures the sisters to a supposed yachting trip. At sea, Helen is attacked by Fernand and dashes to the wireless operator for assistance, but a storm arises and an SOS is barely sent before the ship sinks. An ocean liner, picking up the call, starts for the rescue, and Jack Seville, Helen's sweetheart, a Navy aviator, comes by plane. The sisters and Fernand are cast up on an island and are there sheltered by a hermit, its only inhabitant. Seville and his pilot make a forced landing, and following a struggle between Seville and Fernand the entire party is rescued by the ocean liner.
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