Summary
1830: Congressman-Slouch Slocum Price, velvet-waistcoated oracle of the Carolina backwoods, strides home to find his manor hollow—wife fled, heir vanished, the very air perfumed with another man’s pomade. The scandal detonates his reason; he abdicates marble halls for riverbank anonymity, a laureate of self-ruin drifting downstream with only Solomon Mahaffy—loquacious card-sharp, human life-raft—at his flank. Half a decade later, aboard a Mississippi mud-crawler, Price’s practiced cynicism cracks: a precocious ragamuffin named Hannibal, guarded by the laconic Bob Yancy, carries the angular eyebrows of the woman who gutted him. Before paternity can be proven, Colonel Fentress—silk-scarved monarch of contraband—kidnaps the boy, pitching the narrative into a whirlpool of skiffs, counterfeit coin, and blood-oaths. Hannibal escapes, Price is jailed for unwittingly passing forged notes, and both fugitives converge on a drifting skiff where DNA is intuited rather than tested. Revelations detonate: Fentress engineered the original elopement; the runaway wife was pawn, not queen. Meanwhile Betty Malroy—Hannibal’s confidante, sun-lit muse—marries childhood flame Charley Norton; Fentress’s wedding gift is a bullet. The judge, no longer content with penitence, challenges the outlaw to a duel of flintlock etiquette; Solomon, ever loyal, stands in his stead, absorbs the mortal ball, and thus purchases his friend’s redemption. Price arrives, fires the decisive round, topples Fentress into the river’s amnesiac mud. Fortune restored, he still cedes narrative closure to youth: Betty, trapped in churning rapids with stalwart Bruce Carrington, re-orients her heart toward the future.
Synopsis
Returning to his estate in North Carolina, Judge Slocum Price, a member of Congress in 1830, finds that his wife has taken their child and eloped with David Gatewood; and the domestic tragedy causes him to become a vagabond. Five years later, the judge and his companion (Solomon Mahaffy) on a Mississippi River boat meet a child known as Hannibal, accompanied by Bob Yancy. The judge suspects Hannibal to be his missing son. Colonel Fentress, an outlaw leader, has the boy kidnapped from Yancy, but Hannibal escapes and takes refuge on a skiff; meanwhile, the judge, who has been arrested for innocently passing counterfeit money, escapes, finds Hannibal on the river, and discovers that actually Fentress was the abductor of his wife. Betty Malroy, a friend of Hannibal's, marries Charley Norton, her childhood sweetheart; but Fentress has him shot on their wedding day. Following the rescue of Betty and Hannibal from Fentress, the judge challenges him to a duel. Solomon schemes to go in the judge's place and is mortally wounded; but the judge arrives and shoots Fentress. The judge regains his fortune, and Betty is won over to the affections of Bruce Carrington, who is trapped with her in the rapids.
Review Excerpt
"
A chloroform-laced love letter to the ante-bellum fever dream, The Prodigal Judge surfaces from 1922 like a river-logged steamer, barnacled yet opulent, smelling of wet hemp and gunpowder perfume.
Edward José’s direction—equal parts daguerreotype and delirium—treats every inch of North Carolina celluloid as though it were a blood-blotted manuscript. Earle Foxe’s Judge Price is no mere jilted husband; he is a parliamentarian turned vagabond Hamlet, coat collar upturned against moral contagion. ..."
