The Frame-Up

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.