Summary
A matrimonial earthquake rattles the porcelain composure of Laura Bruce when she stumbles upon her husband—city constabulary’s silver-haired colossus—neck-deep in inebriated debauchery with a nameless ingénue. With the surgical precision of a Cartier jeweler she severs the marital knot, then weds Paul Ramsey, a man whose ambition gleams like newly-minted coin. Westward beckons Dick Turner, sybaritic magnate and connoisseur of other men’s wives, dangling a promotion that will stretch the newlyweds across a continent. Ramsey, sensing the wolf beneath Turner’s tailored smile, hires a sentinel to guard Laura—unknowingly re-arming her discarded first husband, John Bruce, now a smoldering fuse of reprisal. Laura, lured into the fateful numerals of Room 13, finds herself in a shadow-parlor of ex-lovers and present dangers. Turner’s discarded mistress, a cigarette ember in the gloom, exits; a muffled dialogue bleeds through the wall; Ramsey, returned from dusty frontier, eavesdrops from the adjacent den. One gunshot later Turner bleeds onto art-deco tile, and only Laura’s public confession—an aria of shame and loyalty—can unshackle her second spouse from the gallows. Acquittal arrives hand-in-hand with reconciliation, the couple stepping into a fog of moral ambiguity that no Prohibition-era streetlamp can fully illuminate.
Synopsis
Laura Bruce is married to John Bruce, police commissioner. She discovers her husband is enjoying a drunken revel with another woman, and vows she will obtain a divorce. After doing so she weds Paul Ramsey. His employer, Dick Turner, a libertine, offers his a responsible position in the west, and she faces a long separation. Ramsey later learns that Turner is interested in his wife and engages a man to protect her, who happens to be her former husband. She finds this out, but does not know he is bent on vengeance. She is inveigled to go to Turner's apartment, where she meets Turner's former "flame." One of them leaves the apartment which is "Room 13." Returning from the West, Ramsey is taken to an adjoining room by Bruce, and listens to a conversation in "Room 13" between a man and a woman. He is convinced it is his wife's voice. Maddened he rushes to the room and batters down the door. He confronts Turner and shoots him. At the trial Ramsey will go free if his wife confesses she was in the room She does and he is acquitted. A reconciliation follows. - Moving Picture World 1920
Review Excerpt
"Somewhere between the clattering Charleston and the first sour waft of bootleg gin, The Woman in Room 13 stages a marital bloodletting so exquisitely calibrated it feels less like a narrative and more like a psychological vivisection. Director Henry Kolker—never elevated to the pantheon where Lubitsch and DeMille sip immortality—nevertheless wields silence here like a scalpel, carving open the corseted respectability of post-WWI America and revealing the writhing envy beneath.
Laura’s first gli..."
