Summary
Adirondack twilight once shimmered around Violet Dare, a bacchanal sylph who treated matrimony like a masquerade ball; she pirouetted between Joe Brill’s rock-solid ardor and Jim Kent’s feckless grin until the former clamped a ring on her wanderlust. Unchastened, she sprinted down the Path Forbidden—gin-soaked roadhouses, moonlit speedboats, back-room bookies—until Joe slammed the gate, keeping the twins, yet Violet snatched Pearl, the mirror-image half, and vanished like a spark into night smoke. Twenty-five circuits of the sun later, Pearl has metabolized her mother’s reckless chromosomes: she prowls racetracks in silk and scandal, a torch-song Circe luring upright attorney Curtis Holmes toward moral cliff edges. Lucy, the dutious twin reared in pastoral balm, now tends the failing family hotel while Joe, broken by speculative ruin, drifts toward a stroke-clouded asylum. One rain-slick hairpin crash later, concussed Pearl lands in Lucy’s candle-lit foyer; the resemblance startles both women but is dismissed as cosmic whimsy. Curtis, tracking his runaway fiancée, mistakes Lucy’s lambent grace for Pearl’s sulphuric allure, then recalibrates his heart toward permanence. When a barn dance erupts in kerosene flames, Pearl—masquerading in Lucy’s calico—ignites the conflagration, is hauled out by the limping father who finally deciphers the cradle prophecy, and the riven family reheals under the sign of contrition and covenant.
Synopsis
Twenty-five years ago, a frivolous, beautiful girl, Violet Dare, created havoc among the summer boarders at an Adirondack hotel. Two young chaps, Joe Brill and Jim Kent, were the favored ones, but Joe finally married her. Later Violet travels the "Path Forbidden," carousing with male friends, and is finally driven out by the husband, Joe Brill. She wishes to take one of the twin children, but the husband forbids. So she steals one little girl and takes her away. Years later we see the twins grown to womanhood. Neither know of the existence of the other. Pearl, the stolen one, is leading the life her mother led when alive. Lucy is the aid and comfort of the father, who, through unwise investments, loses his money, the shock of which causes a stroke and is removed to an asylum. Lucy then runs a country hotel. Pearl, the evil sister, has gained the love of an honorable young lawyer, Curtis Holmes, who will not marry her unless she gives up her forbidden life. She promises, and the wedding is announced. At the last moment, a dope and race track tout persuades her to go away with him. Traveling by auto, they have an accident, Pearl is carried to the hotel run by Lucy. The sisters notice the marked resemblance but think it merely a co-incidence. Curtis, missing Pearl, follows to the hotel, where he mistakes Lucy for Pearl, but soon finds out his error. He later finds in Lucy all that he had wished for in Pearl, so he transfers his affections. The father recovers and is brought home by Lucy. Shortly after the barn dance, Pearl disguises as Lucy and in lighting a cigarette sets fire to the place and in trying to escape sprains her ankle and faints from pain. The father, Joe Brill, taking his first stroll in the evening, notices the blaze and is told by the farmers that Lucy is in there. Without thought for himself, he carries Pearl out and takes her to the hotel. There he sees it is not Lucy and memory goes back to two small cradles. Asking her name and her mother's he finds his other daughter, Pearl, discovering a father, something she had never known, resolves to leave the "Path Forbidden" and be the comfort of her father who needs her now that Lucy has married Curtis.
Review Excerpt
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In the flicker-pit of a 1910s nickelodeon, where projector gears clack like mechanical castanets, The Path Forbidden unfurls like a taffeta skirt—equal parts temptation and sermon. What survives of the picture (a single tinted 35 mm print, vinegar-sweet and scarred) is a morality play lacquered in moonshine and moonlight, a film that believes devils wear sequins and angels carry hotel ledgers.
Narrative Architecture: A House Split by Mirrors
Hymer’s screenplay, coaxed from his own Broadway pot..."
