Summary
A sudden funeral in sun-cracked earth leaves Mary Ellen Martin, barely eighteen, clutching the tattered reins of a wagon-load of siblings whose collective innocence shines like a lantern against the prairie dusk. Bereft in a house whose silence roars louder than cicadas, she yokes the farm’s last milk-cow to a borrowed cart, trades the familiar horizon for cobblestones, and discovers that the city’s welcome mat is stitched with steel. Every tenement door slams like a judge’s gavel; children are deemed vermin. In desperation she turns architect of illusion, threading her brothers and sisters through a building’s gut via a wheezing dumbwaiter, a clandestine ascension that smells of coal dust and miracles. From the shadows, Dr. Randall—idealistic, stethoscope glinting like a promise—glimpses this smuggling of starlight and feels his pulse relocate to his throat. Meanwhile the street-level denizens are pickpockets, gin-runners, and clandestine cardsharps who treat morality as a vestigial organ. When the building’s burglaries begin, suspicion ricochets off peeling wallpaper and lands squarely on the Martin children, their laughter suddenly criminalized. Yet it is the youngest, barefoot and breadcrumb-trailing, who lures the real thieves into a trap sprung by innocence itself; the landlady, once a dragon guarding rent ledgers, discovers a long-atrophied heart and pumps it back to life. In the final reel, morning light pools on a stairwell as Mary Ellen—no longer custodian but beloved—takes the doctor’s hand, and the camera cranes skyward to frame a family portrait reborn in urban neon.
Synopsis
The death of her mother leaves 18-year-old Mary Ellen Martin alone to care for her eight brothers and sisters. Leaving the farm for the city, Mary Ellen finds that no landlord will have children. She finally uses deception and gets the children into an apartment through a dumbwaiter, thereby attracting the sympathetic attention of young Dr. Randall. It develops that the building houses a number of underworld types; but the children, who by now have been discovered by the landlady, are suspected of a series of burglaries. Luckily, the Martin brood is instrumental in capturing the culprits, the landlady changes her opinion of children, and Mary Ellen marries Dr. Randall.
