Summary
A blithe wraith in white muslin, Messalla slips from her crumbling Washington Square manse into the maw of Fifth Avenue, that gilded serpent her ruined father has painted as a dragon. She does not hunt; she wanders, a moonlit lamb among wolves. Yet every careless footfall detonates retribution: a merchant’s discarded mistress slips into Messalla’s vacated chair and eviscerates him with old love letters; a lace-loving heiress, intoxicated by Messalla’s gasp of admiration, pockets a cobweb collar and is shackled in disgrace; a traffic-struck cop dies under wheels because he turned to glimpse her profile. Papers swapped for dynamite obliterate a mansion; the ashes reveal Messalla’s long-lost mother, resurrected from Fifth Avenue’s belly. The dragon, it seems, devours only its own. Innocence, weaponized by fate, leaves the avenue scorched and strangely cleansed.
Synopsis
Messalla, the embodiment of youth and innocence, lives in an old house in Washington Square, New York City, with her father, who has been ruined financially and lost his wife through the lure of Fifth Avenue. He tells Messalla that the thoroughfare is a dragon lying in wait for victims. Messalla starts out to find the dragon and goes up the avenue. Her meetings with various people bring destruction and death to those who had wrought her father's ruin, although she is unconscious of the effect she is having on their lives. Messalla escapes the wiles of the white slaver. She allows a discarded flame of a big merchant to take her place at dinner to which she has been invited, and the merchant suffers at the hands of the discarded woman. A policeman's attention is attracted to Messalla and a man is killed by an automobile while he is looking at her. At a lacemaker's shop a wealthy young woman is tempted to take a bit of lace because Messalla has admired it, but she is caught and jailed. There is a robbery affecting some papers which have been taken and replaced by a bomb, and Messalla gives the package to a woman who turns out to be her father's lost wife; the house is destroyed after the woman and Messalla leave. There is a reconciliation. All those injured were people who had injured her father, and the dragon has been slain by Messalla's youth and innocence.
Review Excerpt
"
Fifth Avenue exhales sulfur and perfume; into its glittering throat vanishes a child who never learned to hate.
Viewed today, The Dragon feels less like a 1916 one-reeler and more like a prophecy whispered down a century-long corridor. Perley Poore Sheehan and Russell E. Smith have braided a parable so lean it could slit wrists: Manhattan’s golden mile imagined as a mythic reptile, its scales Tiffany glass, its claws denominated in trust-fund dollars. The film’s very structure is serpentine—e..."
