The Daughters of Men

Summary

A gilded cage of chromium and velvet, The Daughters of Men detonates its first flash-bang inside the Crosby brothers’ chandeliered ballroom: Reginald, that tinsel Midas, has turned matrimony into a press junket for excess, his actress bride a sequined headline. One burst of camera flash from labor editor Oscar Lackett and the opulent confetti morphs into picket-signs; the strike’s triad—Burress the soap-box Prometheus, Stolbeck the émigré engineer of dissent, Louise his spark-plug daughter—set the furnaces of the Crosby ironworks sputtering. Into the fray glides John Stedman, briefcase full of injunctions and measured diction, a pacifier with a Harvard crest. Grace Crosby, silk-wrapped patrician, hears the clang of conscience louder than the dinner-gong, trades her pearls for a union pin, and becomes the hinge on which the plot’s iron gate swings. Jealousy, that old serpent, coils when Jem spies Louise’s pupils dilating for John; forged letters, whispered slurs, a midnight dash to a bachelor flat—Grace arrives, ring in hand, to accept a proposal already shadowed by rumor. In the film’s caesura of candle-smoke and radiator-hiss, Grace summons every warring soul to John’s cramped apartment; there, amid overcoats dripping sleet and half-eaten plates of beans, grievances are bartered like pocket watches until the strike dissolves into a brittle, hopeful détente. The camera last glimpses Louise’s face—half victory, half rue—through the fogged pane of a streetcar window, while Grace’s gloved hand tightens around John’s, the Crosby foundries exhaling steam once more, the daughters of men having rewritten the ledger of power in soot and starlight.

Synopsis

Matthew and Reginald Crosby, two brothers, and their cousin, James Thedford, manage an industrial conglomerate. Reginald marries an actress and gives so many lavish and ostentatious parties that one of them leads to a strike after being reported by labor editor Oscar Lackett. The strike leaders are fiery orator Jem Burress, German immigrant Louis Stolbeck, and Stolbeck's feisty daughter Louise, who is also Jem's girlfriend. John Stedman, a labor lawyer, lends moderation to the cause and thus impresses Matthew and Reginald's sister, Grace Crosby, who joins the workers. When Jem, jealous of Louise's infatuation with John, attempts to discredit him with the union members, Louise goes to John's apartment to warn him, but Grace arrives at the same time to accept John's marriage proposal. To prove her devotion to John and the cause, Grace summons her brothers to John's apartment, and when everyone converges, they finally resolve the strike.