Summary
A marble lobby’s hush fractures when Peter V. Wilkinson—patrician, porcelain-smiled, odor of old cash clinging to his collars—bleeds his own trust dry, siphoning depositors’ futures into an clandestine ledger stitched to the name of Leslie, the daughter who still believes the moon dangles from his watch-chain. Overnight, balance sheets become origami swans; tellers’ cages yawn like mausoleums; and the city’s faith, once anchored in brass vaults, drifts upward in smoke curls. Leslie, summoned from finishing-school poise to scalpel-sharp conscience, peels the gilt from paternal myth: signatures forged in the same ink he once used to inscribe her birthday psalms, telegrams that re-route entire mortgages into a ghost account domiciled in the Caymans of the soul. She stalks walnut-paneled boardrooms, confronts the man who once carried her on patent-leather shoulders, and demands restitution—not in installments of contrition but in hard, transferable millions. Their duel ricochets through twilight docks, through jazz-hazed speakeasies where bankers toast with confetti-colored cocktails, through notary offices that smell of rubber stamps and dread. Each scene tightens the garrote of lineage: will she expose the patriarch, implode her own birthright, and perhaps hand herself to prosecutors as accessory? Or will Wilkinson, cornered, fling himself upon the mercy of the daughter he weaponized? In chiaroscuro close-ups, Violet Heming lets silence pool in her irises until it brims over; the camera clings to her tremor like a confession. The final reel lands not on a courthouse staircase but on a dawn pier where father and daughter face a horizon the color of tarnished coin, the stolen millions now either returned or forever lost to tide—an ending as open as a wound that refuses scab.
Crooked banker Peter V. Wilkinson intentionally drives his own company into bankruptcy and puts the bank's deposits into a secret account he has set up using his daughter Leslie's name. A series of events occurs in which Leslie finds out what her father has done and sets out to get him to return all the money he has stolen.
Review Excerpt
"Imagine a world where ticker tape falls like communion wafers and trust is a commodity traded between mahogany desks—this is the world The Running Fight conjures with unnerving immediacy. Directed with surgical detachment by William Hamilton Osborne and Louis Albion, the 1915 silent thrusts us inside the chrome-and-velvet corridors of American finance long before regulatory shadows grew teeth. The film’s very title is a misdirection: the fight is not horizontal across city blocks but vertical, b..."
