Summary
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.
Synopsis
In the city of Bolton, party politics are in the control of two men, Jim Durfee and Gordon Freeman, who intend to keep it that way by running a "figurehead" for mayor. They decide upon Sheridan Dows, known as "Sherry," a young society dilettante, who surprises the political bosses by taking his responsibilities seriously. Aided by Mary Forbes, a girl who works in the settlements, Sherry slowly gains popular support. Alarmed at the threat that he is beginning to pose, Durfee and Freeman plot to eliminate Sherry from the race by framing him in a compromising situation with Mary, but Sherry outwits them. That failing, Durfee plants scurrilous articles about Sherry in the paper, turning popular opinion against him until Mary persuades the paper's editor to refute the attacks. Regaining his popular support, Sherry wins both the election and Mary.
