The Lifted Veil

Clorinda—played by the incandescent Ethel Barrymore—drifts from New York’s gas-lit drawing rooms into a moral fog so thick it seems to muffle even the clang of the trans-Atlantic liner’s bell. She has tasted forbidden fruit in the shape of her dearest friend’s husband, a betrayal that curdles every champagne memory into gall. Fleeing westward across the Atlantic, she hopes the Old World’s cathedrals will echo her remorse back at her until it finally scours her clean. Instead, in a moon-drenched Normandy garden, she collides with Malcolm—Robert Ellis’s Malcolm—who wears decency like a well-cut coat yet is maddeningly unwilling to moralize. His steadfast gaze rekindles her capacity for tenderness, but the scar tissue of guilt prickles; she boards another liner, this time east-to-west, chasing absolution in the very city she once fled. Back home she unburdens herself to Rev. Bainbridge, Charles K. French’s pillar of rectitude whose collar seems starched with conviction. Malcolm reappears, suitcase in hand and hope in throat, only to recoil when the full weight of her confession lands. Yet love, once germinated, is a stubborn weed: Malcolm returns anew, hat literally in hand, to plead for another chance. Between the minister who promises celestial pardon and the bruised worldly lover who offers terrestrial communion, Clorinda opts for the flawed embrace, and the film closes on a train bound for Marseille, veil metaphorically lifted, future tentatively aglow.