Summary
Beneath the burnished veneer of Jazz-Age opulence, a mother’s forged signature detonates a chain reaction of barterable bodies: Mrs. Helen Courtland, matriarch-as-maestro, coolly palms a $25,000 rubber check across the marble countertop of morality, wagering her daughter Anita’s future against the vault of millionaire Woodruffe Clay, a man whose affections arrive swaddled in stock options. The marital contract that follows is less sacrament than acquisition—Anita, corseted in duty, trades pulse for pedigree while her Foreign Legion idealist, Captain Hugh Shannon, lounges in North-African dust, clutching letters that taste of sand and longing. On the wedding night the gilded cage clangs shut: a quarrel, a topple, a skull’s sickening crack against parquet, and thereafter the mansion becomes a cathedral of convalescent cruelty. Sleepwalks turn nocturnal; a spectral vial of prussic acid glimmers on the nightstand like a moonlit promise. When Clay’s heart quits during one such somnambulant fugue, Anita—adrift in guilt’s fog—flees across the Atlantic with her sphinx-eyed nurse Sarah Harden, only to rekindle desert fires with Hugh amid Europe’s collapsing boulevards. Yet evidence, that bloodless prosecutor, tightens its garrote. At the cliff-edge of confession, Sarah unmasks herself: not angel of mercy but archangel of death, having dispensed the poison to liberate her mistress from hymeneal bondage. The final tableau—two women on a fog-lapped pier, guilt and absolution swapping faces—leaves the audience wearing the film’s titular mask: a frozen rictus that could equally be horror or relief.
Synopsis
Mrs. Helen Courtland passes a fake check for $25,000 from a millionaire named Woodruffe Clay, who is in love with her daughter Anita. To save the family from a scandal in court, Anita marries Woodruffe, even though she loves Captain Hugh Shannon of the Foreign Legion. During an argument on their wedding night, Woodruffe falls and is seriously injured, and during his recovery, he makes her life miserable. Anita suffers from sleepwalking, and after one episode she dreams of poisoning her husband, she awakens to find him dead. Believing that she killed Woodruffe, Anita travels to Europe with Sarah Harden, her nurse, and there renews her affair with Hugh. When the evidence points overwhelmingly to Anita, however, she decides to return to America, but before she can confess her guilt, Sarah admits that it was she who killed Woodruffe in order to free her mistress from an unhappy marriage.
