Summary
In a gas-lit drawing room where propriety clings to the wallpaper like fading damask, Mary Bruce—her spine as straight as a Reynolds portrait—watches her father auction her future to a velvet-gloved predator who calls himself Lord Haverford. The price: a stack of banknotes fat enough to stuff the hole in Mr. Bruce’s tattered dignity. By candle’s end, Mary becomes both Penelope and pirate, cracking the family safe, spiriting away the tainted cash, only to collide in the corridor with a second shadow who snatches the loot and leaves her clutching air and the metallic memory of human skin between her teeth. At dawn the house awakens to a theatre of accusations: the secretary who loves her, the parent who sold her, the girl who tried to save them all. Enter Dr. Steele—top-hat, opera cloak, eyes like scalpels—promising exegesis rather than interrogation. In a tour-de-force of baroque deduction he re-stages the crime: the bogus peer is unmasked as a parricidal grifter who slit the real lord’s throat on a Calais pier, sewed the title into his own pocket, and now harvests dowries like scalps. The bitten wrist blooms crimson evidence; the impostor’s cuff rolls back to reveal the crescent scar of Mary’s rebellion. Steele drops the final mask: he is the resurrected Haverford, his supposed sweetheart the maid who has dusted the family secrets while cataloguing them. Order restored, Mary rejects the gilded cage, choosing the penniless secretary and the vertiginous liberty of a love that needs no title deed.
Synopsis
Mary Bruce is wooed by Lord Haverford but loves Roger Benton, her father's secretary. To finalize his marriage proposal, Lord Haverford offers her father a large sum of money and, being low on funds, Mr. Bruce accepts it, then places it in a safe. Horrified by her father's actions, Mary steals the cash from the safe that night, but on her way out is overcome by another thief whose wrist she bites in the ensuing tussle. When the theft is discovered, Mary, Benton and Mr. Bruce are suspected, but Dr. Steele, a detective, convinces Mary that Haverford, or the man who calls himself Haverford, is the actual thief. Steele tells how the phony Haverford attempted to kill the real one, stole his money, assumed his identity and is now extorting cash from Bruce. With the bitten wrist as proof, Steele exposes the impostor, then reveals himself to be the real Lord Haverford, whose sweetheart has been posing as the Bruces' maid. The mystery resolved, Mary and Benton happily reunite.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I saw Thou Shalt Not Steal I emerged from the archive’s basement with the distinct sensation that someone had pick-pocketed my assumptions about 1916 cinema. There is, after all, a lazy consensus that pre-1920 narrative grammar is all fainting virgins and moustache-twirling landlords. Claire Whitney’s Mary Bruce faints exactly never; instead she weaponizes a glare capable of melting vault steel. The film—newly restored by EYE and streaming in 2K—runs a brisk five reels, yet each..."
