The County Chairman

Summary

In a sun-blistered county seat where dust motes pirouette through courthouse shafts, Jim Hackler—part potentate, part penitent ghost—presides over back-room caucuses like a bourbon-soaked Prospero, his ledger of grudges inked in scarlet. Years earlier, wartime trenches had welded him to idealistic Elias Rigby; their epistolary lifeline was severed when Rigby filched the perfumed letters meant for Hackler, marrying the unseen sweetheart and sealing a betrayal that calcified into calcined obsession. Now Rigby—silver-haired, righteous—declares a run for District Attorney, igniting Hackler’s dormant vendetta. With Machiavellian languor, the boss coaxes Rigby’s future son-in-law, a callow lawyer whose ambition gleams like patent leather, to mount a counter-campaign, promising patronage plums and the illusion of destiny. Yet the scheme ricochets: the fiancé’s stump speeches stir dormant civic pride; Rigby’s daughter, once a cipher in lace, becomes the election’s moral fulcrum; and Hackler, confronted by the spectral image of his own youthful innocence, discovers that revenge is a rusted coin which purchases only further corrosion. In the final reel, torchlight parades dissolve into rain-slick silence; ballots are cast; a friendship’s corpse is exhumed and imperfectly buried again; and Hackler—bereft of office, love, even enmity—shambles down an empty dirt road while the camera lingers on a discarded campaign banner flapping like a broken wing against the sunrise.

Synopsis

Jim Hackler is the political boss of a small town. When local lawyer Elias Rigby decides to run for Distrct Attorney, Hackler sees a chance to get revenge on Rigby--years ago both men were in the Army and best friends, but Rigby had intercepted letters to Hackler from his sweetheart, and wound up marrying the girl himself. Hackler persuades Rigby's daughter's fiance' to run against him, but things don't quite work out the way he wanted.