Summary
Tenement roofs scrape the belly of a sooty Manhattan sky; from one such precipice Mickey O’Shaunnessey—tubercular, chalk-skinned, half angel—keeps vigil over a city that has already swallowed his parents. Below, his sister Hilda, a clerk in the toy department of a glittering department store, trades daylight for nickels so that Mickey might one day breathe pine-scented air in a distant sanitarium. Above, on the adjoining roof, bohemian widower Emery Gray paints sunsets in oil while his sprite-like daughter Susan sketches chalk constellations that dissolve in the first December sleet. Their worlds collide when Mickey and Susan build a paper-boat navy between chimney pots; soon Emery glimpses Hilda in her frayed coat, eyes luminous with desperation, and begins to paint her not as she is but as she refuses to be: defeated. Christmas approaches like a predator wrapped in tinsel; the store’s proprietor, Gregory Stearns, a velvet-gloved vulture, prowls the aisles, sniffing out innocence. He offers Hilda a fur coat—sable, voluptuous, the pelt of a slaughtered dream—expecting her body in return. She accepts, pawns the coat for Mickey’s ticket west, then climbs to the roof’s lip, coatless, ready to trade her last breath for the price of her brother’s. Emery, brush still wet with her portrait, catches her mid-air, confesses that Stearns once stole his wife, and thus the two broken families stitch themselves into one fragile, defiant quilt.
Synopsis
Hilda O'Shaunnessey lives in a New York City tenement with her younger, invalid brother, Mickey, and relatives Mr. and Mrs. Brady. Because of Mickey's frail health, the boy spends most of his time on the roof, and Hilda works as a clerk in a department store toy department to raise enough money to send him to a sanitarium. Mickey befriends a little girl, Susan Gray, who lives with her single, artist father, Emery Gray, in a bungalow on the adjoining roof; when Emery meets Hilda, he is impressed by her devotion to her brother. As Christmas season approaches, Hilda takes an extra job in the toy department dressing up as animated dolls. Soon she catches the attention of the store's leering proprietor, Gregory Stearns, who makes several advances toward the young beauty, and asks what gift she would like for Christmas. Knowing what the older, wealthy man has in store for her, and seeing a way out of her troubles, Hilda asks for an expensive fur coat. When Stearns delivers the gift, Hilda pawns it to pay for Mickey's treatment at the sanitarium, then hurries to the roof to commit suicide before yielding to her employer's desires. However, Emery Gray prevents her from jumping, and exposes Stearns as the man who stole his wife. Emery asks for Hilda's hand in marriage, and Mickey is cured in the hospital.
Review Excerpt
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The first time we see Hilda O’Shaunnessey she is reflected—literally—in the polished copper of a toy-train track that spirals through the store’s holiday window like a gilded serpent. May McAvoy plays her with the brittle radiance of a candle burned at both ends yet somehow still standing upright; her pupils are twin soot-smears that know the exact weight of every nickel in the till. Director George James Hopkins (pulling double duty as co-writer) keeps the camera at doll-eye level so that sky..."
