Summary
Frank Marham—a hayseed whose boots still hum with barn-dust—steps off the rattling milk-train into Manhattan’s electric roar, hired as apprentice to a Fifth-Avenue jeweler whose shopfront glitters like a frozen nebula. Within the brass-and-velvet labyrinth he meets Ruth Gardner, a sob-sister with ink in her veins and a nose for malfeasance, and Dan Lantry, a trench-coated detective whose heart ticks louder than his badge. The store’s suave manager, Roger Imlay—part courtier, part spider—moonlights as strategist for a syndicate that covets the proprietor’s talismanic emerald, the Green Flame, a stone said to hold the last breath of extinct jungles. Imlay, sniffing Frank’s rustic awe, baits the newcomer into ferrying the jewel to a shadowed loft above the Bowery where gaslight drips like molasses. Yet the bumpkin is a wolf in denim: clandestine operative for the Jeweler’s Protective Association. In a heartbeat of reversed expectations Frank unveils wire-recorders and hidden revolvers; chandeliers shatter; the emerald’s verdant pulse flickers across sweating faces. Lantry bursts in, cuffs ready, mistaking the savior for the kingpin until the store’s white-haired owner storms upstairs to reveal the masquerade’s architect. With larceny thwarted and headlines secured, Ruth ditches her notebook for Frank’s calloused hand; together they vanish into the city’s arterial neon, the Green Flame now safe beneath plate glass, glinting like a wink from the future.
Synopsis
Country bumpkin Frank Marham comes to New York City to work in a world-famous jewelry store. At the hotel where he lives, Frank meets Ruth Gardner, a newspaper reporter who is investigating the operations of a gang of jewel thieves, as is also her admirer, detective Dan Lantry. The store's manager, Roger Imlay, is a member of the gang which is planning to steal the famous emerald known as the "Green Flame," owned by the proprietor. Capitalizing on Frank's naïveté, Imlay tricks him into bringing the gem to the gang's headquarters, but Frank, actually a member of the Jeweler's Protective Association, surprises the crooks. At that moment, Lantry arrives and, mistaking Frank for the leader of the crooks, is about to arrest him when the owner of the store arrives and explains that he had hired Frank to watch Imlay. The mystery satisfactorily solved, Ruth and Frank fall into each other's arms.
Review Excerpt
"
Manhattan, circa 1920, is a staccato fever dream of clanging elevateds and kerosene dusk; The Green Flame captures that vertigo with such granular zeal that one can almost smell hot tar and roasted chestnuts drifting out of the frame. Director Edwin Wallock—seldom celebrated outside hard-cinephile circles—threads the city’s contradictions through every shot: opulence scraping elbows with destitution, electric light sparring with soot.
Frank’s entrance is pure visual onomatopoeia: a lanky silh..."
