Summary
Petroleum-slicked hills bleed under a bruised Pennsylvania sky while Jane Brett—once dispatched to the city with coins scraped from her father’s calloused knuckles—returns as a graduate nurse, only to find her kin corroding faster than the derricks. A brother turned sneak-thief; a sister lured by a city sharper’s silken lies; a father crippled in a rig explosion, his wages severed quicker than bone. Jane’s fury crystallizes into a double-edged vow: vengeance against the gilded puppeteer William Jameson, and deliverance for the soot-blackened proletariat. She gate-crashes a masked charity ball—guests masked as gazelles and Roman senators—cornering the magnate in a mahogany den. A silver paper-knife flashes; detectives pounce; she is spared the cell by the intercession of the heir, John Jameson, a reluctant prince who already dreams of smashing his father’s gilded cage. Back among the roustabouts Jane incites a clandestine strike: fire the wells, let the earth vomit wealth skyward in a pyre of retribution. Love complicates sabotage—John, incognito in worker’s denim, kindles her heart, while Morgan, the union’s smoldering chieftain, covets both her loyalty and her lips. On the eve of ignition Morgan unmasks the patrician intruder; Jane, torn between insurrection and tenderness, staggers into the mob’s path, shielding her lover with her own trembling body. In a final coup de théâtre John strips off disguise, bares chest to the torches, and barters patrimony for justice; the wells cool, the sirens hush, and the soot-stained horizon flushes with an improbable dawn.
Synopsis
The scene is set in the Pennsylvania petroleum region. Oil worker William Brett has used his scanty hoard of savings to send his daughter Jane to the city to secure a higher education. Completing her course as a trained nurse, Jane visits her old home. Amid the settlement's corroding influence, her brother becomes a thief. Jane's sister Annie falls a prey to the blandishments of a tempter from the city. Fired with indignation against the injustice of affairs, Jane devotes herself to the double mission of avenging and of righting the wrongs of which her family and the community in general have been subjected. Her father is seriously hurt in an accident at work, and his pay is stopped. Jane hastens to the city, determined to make an effort to awaken William Jameson, the millionaire owner of the oil field, to a realization of the wrongs imposed upon the workers. She arrives at a time when the millionaire's son John Jameson, who glimpsed the light of uplift, is vainly pleading with his father to listen to his plans for the betterment of the workers' conditions. Jane is compelled to force her way into the Jameson mansion during the progress of a bal masque given in aid of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She accosts William Jameson in his study, and wild with anger and further maddened by the millionaire's gibes, she tries to kill him and is arrested by detectives. Although she and young Jameson have not met, the latter is instrumental in obtaining her release. Jane goes back to the workers and a secret strike is formed, Jane being the ring-leader. They determine to fire the wells to teach Jameson a lesson. It is at this time that John Jameson comes to the oil wells to investigate conditions. His identity is not known by anyone except the superintendent. Morgan, the ringleader of the workers, is in love with Jane, and on the eve of the firing of the wells he learns of Jameson's identity by breaking into his cottage. The same evening, to save the property, young Jameson goes to Jane, confesses his identity, and pleads with her to help him save the property. Jane is in a quandary. She has fallen in love with the man, whom she believed to be a workman, and he with her. Finally, when she goes to the meeting place of the strikers and pleads with them to hold off, Morgan, who has just broken into Jameson's hut, rushes in, and accuses her of being a traitor. There is a fight. They trample over Jane and rush to the wells. Jane, realizing that they will turn to her unsuspecting lover and try to kill him, drags herself to him and just in time throws herself in front of him as the strikers rush to kill him. However, John Jameson bares himself to the strikers, asks them to listen to him, and proves to them that he is there on their behalf. He then goes to his father and forces him to give in to the strikers, and all ends happily.
Review Excerpt
"
Petroleum, pistols, and proletarian ire—The Toilers distills 1916 America into one combustible fable.
Long before the phrase “class warfare” became cable-news Muzak, director Daniel Carson Goodman drilled straight into Pennsylvania’s black-blooded crust and struck a gusher of outrage. The resulting picture, now a century old, feels like someone cross-bred The End of the Road’s moral panic with the proto-noir fatalism of Sperduti nel buio, then lit the fuse with a suffragette’s kerosene convict..."
