Summary
A frost-bitten fable of American capital unspools inside a soot-choked mining hamlet: two porcelain-doll doppelgängers—Fay, the velvet-shod heiress starved for tenderness, and Bessie, the soot-smudged miner's daughter who still believes in lullabies—swap identities as casually as trading marbles. One soot-streaked afternoon their mirrored faces ignite a chain-reaction of mistaken filiation, toppling coal-baron William Van Loan's granite heart and, with it, the entire apparatus of wage serfdom. In the crucible of a strike that bleeds into near-insurrection, the children become living Rorschach blots upon which adults project their hungers for innocence, redemption, or revenge. The film's volatile tonics—fairy-tale whimsy, labor-doc realism, Gothic doubling—ferment into a hallucination of class reconciliation staged inside a nursery. When the final fuse of recognition sparks, the mine owner capitulates not to picket lines but to the spectral memory of his own forsaken childhood, now refracted through Bessie's lambent eyes. A silent-era phantasmagoria, equal parts Dickensian coincidences and coal-dust chiaroscuro, whose moral is scrawled in ash: empires may collapse, yet the face of a child can still mint mercy.
Synopsis
No one seems to understand or love Fay, the little spoiled granddaughter of William Van Loan, a hard-hearted capitalist, but the old family butler, who tells her fairy stories. In Powhatan, a mining town controlled by Van Loan, Bessie, a sweet motherless child of Jasper Hunt, a mine foreman, lives with their housekeeper, Mrs. Flannigan. The mining company raises the price of food stuffs at the only store; the men resent this, and failing to get increased pay, strike. Van Loan refuses to yield and decides to use scab labor. Scenes of violence follow and, compelled to go to Powhatan, Van Loan takes Fay with him. Fay meets and plays with Bessie and for fun they change dresses. Separated, the unusual likeness deceives the Van Loan governess, who supposes Bessie to be Fay and whisks her away. Mrs. Flannigan finds and takes Fay, sick from exposure, to the Hunt home. Business hurriedly recalls Van Loan and mistaken for a changed Fay, Bessie revolutionizes the Van Loan household by her sweetness. Hunt, the real leader of the striking men, is summoned to meet Van Loan. During the unsuccessful arbitration meeting, Bessie comes in to bid her "grandfather" good night and, seeing her father, rushes to his arms. Hunt, busy with the strike, supposes her to be ill at home. They are all dumbfounded. Bessie tells them how she and Fay changed clothes. Looking up the family trees, the likeness of the "twin" kiddies is explained, and, completely won over, Van Loan yields to the men and Hunt is made mine superintendent. Years of dread follow, and just as a report of the other's death reaches him, his foe appears, immensely wealthy and wreaks the vengeance in a spectacular manner.
