Society girl Constance Bailey becomes a schoolteacher in New York's Lower East Side, telling her fiancé, Bruce Van Griff, that she is sailing to Europe. Seeing that he has been tricked, Van Griff joins the police force, getting a post on the corner where the school is located.


The first time we see Constance Bailey she is a silhouette framed by a stained-glass skylight, her cigarette-holder poised like a conductor’s baton above a score of gossip. Within sixty seconds that gilded cocoon is shredded: she lies to her fiancé, boards no Atlantic liner, and instead descends into a world where the ...

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Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.

Joseph Franz

Robert N. Bradbury
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"The first time we see Constance Bailey she is a silhouette framed by a stained-glass skylight, her cigarette-holder poised like a conductor’s baton above a score of gossip. Within sixty seconds that gilded cocoon is shredded: she lies to her fiancé, boards no Atlantic liner, and instead descends into a world where the air itself feels borrowed. Directors Penrhyn Stanlaws and Edwin L. Hollywood shoot her transformation with a vertiginous tilt—camera angled so the tenement stairs appear to swallow..."
Dorothy Yost, Margaret Elizabeth Sangster
United States


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