Summary
In a lantern-lit Midwestern town where the streets curve like question marks, the Madison household revolves around Cora, a porcelain-skinned sylph who treats affection as currency and flattery as oxygen. She pirouettes through silk-draped parlors, trailing a wake of smitten uncles, cousins, and beaux who mortgage their dignity to fund her whims. Richard Lindley, earnest as a hymnal, offers her a ring, blind to the trembling adoration of Laura—Cora’s moon-faced, needle-witted sister—who hides love letters between the pages of seed catalogues. Into this hothouse drifts Valentine Corliss, a velvet-gloved confidence man returning under a carnival of banners promising 40% dividends; his smile is a switchblade, his eyes a ledger. Cora, drunk on flattery, filches her father’s signature from a mahogany escritoire, believing she is scripting her own emancipation; instead she inks the family’s ruin. When Corliss bolts for Manhattan’s neon canyons, the town’s emptied savings clatter behind him like tin cans tied to a honeymoon car. Papa Madison faces the pillory, Cora’s engagement implodes in a frost of recrimination, and Laura—once a wallpaper presence—erupts, dragging her sister back to the witness chair of conscience. Jimmy Madison, prodigal cousin and part-time rake, barges in with a telegram and a pistol, intercepting Corliss on the Pennsylvania platform. The forged paper flutters to the parquet like a dying butterfly; truth, not romance, wins the day. Lindley, nudged by Hedrick’s childish prank of swapped valentines, finally deciphers Laura’s Morse-code heartbeats, and the last reel dissolves in a kiss that feels less like clinch than covenant.
Synopsis
Cora, a flirt, and the pampered pet of the entire Madison family who sacrifice to humor her whims, becomes engaged to Richard Lindley who does not know that Laura Madison silently loves him. Valentine Corliss, a former member of the community, reappears with a big stock scheme and Cora falls for him. Pretending love, he uses Cora and endeavors to get her father to become secretary of his company knowing his name and reputation will lend prestige. Cora brings Corliss the paper with her father's signature which later proves to have been forged. Corliss makes a getaway but is nabbed as he reaches New York. In the meantime, the townspeople who have been cheated demand the arrest of Papa Madison. Cora, to get away, goes to Lindley but he says their engagement was a mistake. She then goes to another admirer and they are immediately married. Laura, learning of the situation, becomes enraged, gets Cora, and brings her home where she confesses, despite her father's attempt to keep her silent. Jimmy Madison, to whom Papa appealed when he got in trouble, appears and with the arrest of Corliss affairs are straightened out. Lindley, who through a prank of little Hedrick, has learned of Laura's intense love, sees his error and they become happily married.
Review Excerpt
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Booth Tarkington’s name on a marquee in 1922 meant mercury in the thermometer: the mercury shot up, the house swelled, and every corseted matron in the Midwest braced for a looking-glass that would show her own drawing-room blemishes magnified to carnival proportions. The Flirt, adapted by Andrew Percival Younger from Tarkington’s Saturday Evening Post serial, is less a morality play than a vivisection—performed with silver nitrate scalpels under carbon-arc glare.
Cora Madison, incarnated by ..."
