The Stormy Petrel

A tempest of suppressed desires engulfs a rigid New England dynasty when Eleanor Vance (Clara Beyers), the prodigal 'stormy petrel,' returns to her ancestral estate after a scandalous European absence. Her arrival coincides with her cousin Arthur's (Robert Ames) engagement to the fragile Helen (Louise Huff), igniting psychological warfare across mahogany-paneled drawing rooms. As Eleanor weaponizes erotic magnetism against the family patriarch (Howard Truesdale) and Helen's physician suitor (Howard Kyle), stolen letters reveal a decades-old illegitimacy that threatens dynastic collapse. The climax unfolds not amidst howling gales, but through a devastating parlor confrontation where generations of repressed Puritanism shatter like crystal against the fireplace.