The Frame-Up

Summary

A gilded layabout, Jeffrey Claiborne, steps from his father’s velvet-lined bubble into the sooty clangor of a city cabstand where Betty Jane Moir—radiant, working-class, and harassed by a wolfish chauffeur—becomes the axis his universe tilts upon. In the flicker of a nickelodeon instant, privilege masquerades as poverty: Jeffrey dons a dispatcher’s visor, courts danger in grease-smudged garages, and offers up a solitaire ring like a knight-errant handing over a tin foil sword. Betty’s mother, imperious in her ignorance, scoffs at the match, branding the suitor a penniless drifter. The rebuff detonates inside Jeffrey a need to transmute money-borne shame into gallantry; providence provides a crucible when he uncovers a cabal of extortionists squeezing the family firm through forged ledgers and whispered threats. What follows is a shadow ballet of falsified identities, midnight rendezvous beneath Third Avenue trestles, and a climactic chase where taxi meters tick like countdown clocks toward either ruin or redemption.

Synopsis

Young Jeffrey Claiborne, the son of a wealthy father, comes to the aid of pretty Betty Jane Moir, who is being bothered by a lecherous chauffeur. He accepts Betty's grateful offer of employment in her mother's taxi company. Smitten, Jeffrey proposes to her, but her mother, not knowing who he really is, dismisses him as not worthy of being her daughter's husband. Determined to prove his worth, he gets his chance when he discovers that Betty's mother is being blackmailed by a criminal gang.