Summary
In a sun-dappled California idyll, prosperous Gordon Kingsley believes his universe is stitched from fidelity and fatherly bliss until a single canvas at a draftsman’s atelier detonates that illusion: the architect Frank Mason has immortalized Dorothy and little Mary Jane in oils, their likenesses glowing like holy relics upon his easel. The brushstrokes ignite a corrosive suspicion; Gordon commissions a hawk-eyed gumshoe to tail every footfall of his wife. Simultaneously, he commissions Mason to blueprint a palatial new home, a cruel jest that forces the two men into velvet-gloved combat over a shared secret. Dorothy, sensing the tightening noose, slips Frank a clandestine note begging for a twilight tryst inside his shadow-swathed apartment. Frank, once a nimble second-story man, has forsworn crime, spurning his old confederates when they propose one last heist; their arrest provokes a vengeful comrade to gun him down moments before Dorothy arrives. She stumbles upon the cooling corpse, presumes her husband has committed an immaculate revenge, and when a police detective barges in she blurts a confession that shatters every mirror of her marriage: the cherished child is not the fruit of her womb but of Frank’s blood, secretly adopted while Gordon was away on business. Gordon, eavesdropping from behind a lacquered screen, steps forward not with wrath but with tremulous absolution; the actual killer is soon manacled, and the couple walk into the fog-choked night carrying only the fragile lantern of reconstructed truth.
Synopsis
Gordon Kingsley lives happily with his wife Dorothy and little daughter Mary Jane. However, when he visits the home of San Francisco architect Frank Mason, he is stunned to find a portrait of his own wife and daughter. Suspecting the worst of Dorothy, he hires a private detective. Soon after, Gordon asks Frank to design his new house, and Dorothy, fearing that he knows of her association with Frank, slips the latter a note arranging a private visit in his apartment. Frank, a reformed thief, refuses to stage a robbery with his old accomplices, and when they are arrested, one of the gang accuses Frank of informing the police and kills him. Arriving at his apartment, Dorothy assumes that Gordon killed him and is hiding the body when a detective enters. Unaware that Gordon is in the next room, Dorothy confesses that, unable to have a child, she had secretly adopted Frank's baby in Gordon's absence. Relieved, Gordon forgives his wife, while the real murderer is caught and arrested.
Review Excerpt
"
Silence, in 1918, was never empty; it quivered with the rustle of taffeta, the metallic click of a revolver hammer, the soft intake of breath before a lie. The White Lie wields that silence like a scalpel, dissecting the placid surface of domestic life to expose the raw sinew of fear and yearning beneath.
Director Julian La Mothe, moonlighting from his usual screenwriting perch, orchestrates a chamber piece of glances and withheld letters. Bessie Barriscale’s Dorothy is no florid victim; her ..."
