Summary
A porcelain-heiress, Margaret Primrose, is bartered like a rare figurine from cabinet to saloon: her tyrannical father, still smarting from a blood-feud bankruptcy orchestrated by the North dynasty, spitefully welds her to the dissolute millionaire Weston, driving true love Ted North to sagebrush exile. Seven calendars of champagne rot later, the brittle couple resettle in frontier cattle country on doctor’s orders; Weston’s liver is a map of busted capillaries, Margaret’s heart an unmarked grave. Across the mesas Ted has grown granite-tough, rearing the orphaned moppet of a rustler his own posley once lynched—atonement in dusty fringe. A runaway bronc throws Margaret into his lariat; the past snaps taut, but propriety scissors the embrace. Weston, ever thirsty, courts Molly, the velvet-gloved proprietress of a ragtime dance hall, until jealous Quick-Foot Jim plugs him in the dark. Circumstantial smoke billows around Ted; a jury fastens the noose. Meanwhile Jim kidnaps Molly, truth gallops, and a posse—its torches flickering like moral retinas—thunders after. The reel ends, tantalizingly, on the hoofbeats of ambiguity: will the horizon swallow justice or mercy?
Synopsis
Margaret Primrose is not permitted to see Ted North, who loves her, by her father, whom Ted's father ruined. To spite Ted, Primrose forces Margaret to marry Weston, a dissolute young millionaire, and Ted, heartbroken, goes West. Weston neglects Margaret and continues drinking. Seven years later, the Westons move West on the advice of his doctor to improve his health. Ted, meanwhile, has adopted the small daughter of a cattle rustler who was lynched by Ted's cowboys. When he spots a runaway horse and lassoes its rider, Margaret, they embrace, but realizing the impropriety, they bid each other goodbye. Weston resumes drinking and takes an interest in Molly, the proprietress of a dance hall. When Molly's sweetheart, "Quick Foot Jim" learns that Molly and Weston are planning to elope, he kills Weston. After Ted is convicted of the murder, based on circumstantial evidence, Jim abducts Molly. When Margaret learns the truth, a posse is organized to find Jim. No information has been located concerning the film's ending.
Review Excerpt
"
A nickelodeon ghost gallops out of 1911, trailing nitrate embers and unanswerable questions: can the heart be branded like cattle, or does it merely scar? The Cowboy and the Lady answers with a shiver you still feel eleven decades later.
The plot, stitched from Clyde Fitch’s Broadway chrysalis, is less a story than a social vivisection. Margaret Primrose—named like a hothouse bloom—enters the frame already corseted by capital. Her father’s fortune is built on porcelain, those brittle heirloom..."
