Summary
A crimson-gloved sonnet of ruin, The Flames of Justice begins in a candle-scented parlour where Marie, all ivory shoulders and defiant pupils, trades glances with Conrad—each look a clandestine contract against the iron will of his patriarch. The father’s death—an amber-lit tussle, blade flashing like a comet—propels Conrad into the night, a vagabond stitched to his guilt. Years later, a rain-slick reunion in a fog-bruised alley ends with police lanterns; Marie barters her body to the judge’s serpentine offspring, spawning a daughter who will drift like a paper boat through the film’s whirlpool of ironies. The infant, swaddled in anonymity, is ferried to marble halls while Marie descends into roulette smoke and gas-lamp perdition, her silhouette a bruise against velvet curtains. The grown child, wearing the ebony cross that once hung between her mother’s breasts, unwittingly rescues her step-brother from Marie’s own den of chance—kin colliding like magnets reversed. Bargains ossify: Marie, hollow-cheeked, agrees to sell the girl to Clifford, the judge’s pampered heir; neither recognises the merchandise as flesh of their flesh. Recognition arrives in a single heartbeat—the cross glints, memory detonates, and a kerosene lamp topples into Prometheus territory. Clifford becomes a human torch, Conrad staggers from prison to carry both women through the inferno, and Marie expires on the stone steps, smoke wreathing her like a coronet.
Synopsis
Marie and Conrad desire to marry one another, his father opposing the match. The old man is killed by the son in self-defense, and Conrad is forced to run away. Some time later Marie and Conrad meet again. The boy is arrested by the police while with her. She, in order to save his life, is forced to sell herself to the judge's son, and a baby is born. Marie leaves the child in the care of strangers, intending to kill herself. She is prevented and becomes the keeper of a gambling house, the money for which is furnished by a rich man. Her child is adopted by a wealthy family, and on growing up saves her foster brother from her own mother's gambling house, not knowing the relationship. Years pass by. Her lover, Conrad, is in prison and Marie is a penniless outcast. She bargains with Clifford, the judge's son, to sell the girl to him, neither knowing the victim is their own child. At the last moment it is discovered by the black cross which the girl wears, and which had been given her by Marie years before. Clifford and Conrad, now released, meet, and in the fight the lamp is overturned. Clifford perishing in the flames. The two women escape, Conrad carrying them out. Marie dies in her faithful lover's arms.
Review Excerpt
"
The first time I saw The Flames of Justice it was a 16 mm print struck from a nitrate negative that smelled faintly of almonds and extinction. The bulb of the projector coughed a dull orange, and suddenly Julia de Kelety’s face—those cheekbones sharp enough to slice bread—filled the room like an accusation.
There is a moment, twenty-three minutes in, when Marie lifts her veil in a dockside tavern. The camera holds so long you can practically taste the salt on her lower lip. That image alone j..."
