Summary
In a narrative that oscillates between provincial farce and maritime melodrama, Louise Grayling orchestrates a radical departure from the stifling moralism of her aunt’s household to seek the salt-crusted sanctuary of Cape Cod. Her destination is the domicile of Uncle Abe, a man whose social standing is as fragile as the weathered shingles of his general store. Abe, perpetually subjugated by a draconian housekeeper and the biting cynicism of the local gentry, has constructed a phantasmagorical armor: a fictional brother named Amzon. This 'Amzon' is a grotesque synthesis of every buccaneer to ever haunt the high seas—a composite of Blackbeard’s savagery and the calculated greed of a war profiteer. When Louise unmasks this fabrication, she does not rebuke him; instead, she catalyzes a metamorphosis, coercing the docile Abe to inhabit the skin of his own invention. The deception spirals into an atmospheric nightmare when a group of shipwrecked East Indians arrive, convinced that Abe is the perpetrator of a distant temple desecration. As the villagers succumb to the paranoid delusion that Amzon has murdered the 'missing' Abe, the film descends into a claustrophobic study of mob mentality, ultimately resolved by the intervention of a millionaire masquerading as a common laborer, facilitating a restoration of Abe’s dignity and a romantic resolution for the audacious Louise.
Synopsis
Louise Grayling escapes from a straight-laced aunt on a plea that she wants to visit her uncle, Captain Abe, on Cape Cod. Abe is henpecked by his housekeeper and rather looked down upon by the villagers who haunt his store. To give himself a fictitious glory he invents a fictitious brother, Amzon, who is a composite of all the pirates from Blackbeard to the food profiteers. Louise penetrates the deception and induced Abe to go away and come back as the fictitious brother. She has the time of her life keeping the placid Abe up to the reputation of his fire-eating brother, but all would have gone well had not some shipwrecked East Indians imagined that they recognized him as the desecrator of their Temple. Between them and the town people, who get the idea that Abe has been murdered by Amzon, Louise has her hands full, but Abe is transformed into his proper self, and a supposed fisherman who turns out to be a young millionaire rescues her from the mob and all ends happily after all. - Moving Picture World.
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