The Figurehead

Bolton’s smoky backrooms exhale cigar haze and cynicism; two iron-fisted string-pullers, Durfee the ward heeler and Freeman the newspaper magnate, audition a porcelain-pretty aristocrat—Sheridan “Sherry” Dows—as their ventriloquist dummy. They expect a marionette who will kiss babies, sign contracts, and vanish after inauguration. Instead they birth a conscience. Sherry, silk-scarfed and champagne-wasted at dawn, sobers under the fluorescent glare of settlement-house misery, his cheekbones still aristocratic but now lit by the kerosene of outrage. Beside him, Mary Forbes—coal-eyed, ink-smudged, sleeves rolled like a laborer—teaches him that policy is poetry written in sidewalk chalk and eviction notices. The bosses’ first trap is erotic slander: a hotel room rigged with flash powder and a half-dressed actress. Sherry swaps coats, exits via the fire escape, and leaves the shutter to snap an empty bed. Round two is printer’s ink: headlines shrieking “Cradle-Robber,” “Draft-Dodger,” “Dandy Drunk.” Mary storms the newsroom, slaps down affidavits, and blackmails the editor with a ledger of political kickbacks. The film ends on Bolton’s courthouse steps at twilight, confetti drifting like dirty snow, Sherry kissing Mary while the city’s neglected bells—unused since the last war—spontaneously clang, not because someone pulled a rope but because the crowd, for once, believes the sound belongs to them.