Summary
A Scottish inn’s stone hearth crackles with insult; steel flashes, scarlet blooms, and Captain Gordon—his regimentals splashed with another man’s blood—vanishes into the Highland mist, only to re-materialize amid Manhattan’s electric glare, a fugitive shadow trailed by the inexorable Detective Jenks. There, under the chromium shimmer of Broadway lights, Gordon’s kilted guilt collides with the gilded ennui of heiress Marjory Seaton, whose uncle would auction her porcelain beauty to the debt-splashed roué Winslow while her own gaze lingers on the velvet-shouldered sportsman Sylvester. A charity masquerade at the Waldorf becomes a panicked ballet: Gordon, spying Jenks’s bowler in the chandeliers, pirouettes through servants’ corridors and tumbles into the subterranean empire of fight promoter Brooks, who shoves him—bare-knuckled and identity-smeared—into the ring as substitute for the cunning burglar-pugilist Deacon. One seismic uppercut later, the counterfeit lordling is fêted by Astor blood, then unmasked amid crystal and aspic when the authentic earl arrives; police whistles crescendo while, in a flickering library, Gordon thwarts Deacon’s crack-safe larceny. Jenks storms in—not with handcuffs but with a barrister’s satchel bulging with overdue legacy—and Marjory’s scorn melts into Highland-flavored rapture.
Synopsis
During a quarrel at a Scottish inn, Captain Gordon wounds another officer and flees to New York with detective Jenks on his trail. Once there, he meets Marjory Seaton, an heiress whom her Uncle Tidmarsh is trying to marry to the profligate Winslow, but she is interested in fashionable sportsman Sylvester. One night at a ball, Gordon spies Jenks following him and, in the course of his escape, accepts refuge from a fight promoter named Brooks. At Brooks' request, Gordon substitutes for Sylvester's opponent, burglar Deacon, at a charity bout, and knocks out the real pugilist. Later, during a dinner party at the Tidmarshes', Gordon is mistaken for a lord and, when the real nobleman appears, is denounced as an impostor. The police are called, and while awaiting their arrival, Gordon prevents Deacon's attempt to rob the Tidmarsh safe. With the appearance of Jenks, who discloses that the quest for his search was to deliver a large inheritance to Gordon, Marjory declares her love for the Scotsman and all ends happily.
Review Excerpt
"
If you ache for the days when a single mis-plucked sword could ricochet from Inverness to Broadway, The Fourteenth Man is your celluloid dram of 100-proof adrenaline.
There is a moment—about seventeen minutes into this 1920 silent, once thought lost in the nitrate inferno—when the camera abandons its polite proscenium perch and hurtles after Robert Warwick’s kilted Captain as he sprints across a fog-clogged Scottish moor. The lens wobbles, huffs, almost trips on heather. That tremor, that brea..."
