Summary
A foundling—swaddled in anonymity, swaddled in scandal—arrives on the marble doorstep of the decaying Gosnell manse, where gaslight licks the peeling damask like a gossip’s tongue. Evelyn Gosnell, matriarch by title, spinster by reputation, opens the door to an infant bundled inside a theatre program and a pawn ticket for a ruby brooch once flaunted at the Metropolitan. Across town, Lucy Fox—chorus-girl turned reluctant sleuth—tips her cloche to a silhouette watching from the roof of the El, unaware the silhouette is Earl Metcalfe, war-shattered silhouette-artist whose paper-cuttings of missing children finance his morphine habit. The child grows, as children do, into a mirror: every aunt, every suitor, every creditor sees in the toddler’s opaque eyes either salvation or indictment. Montgomery Flagg’s screenplay folds time like origami: a 1919 summer dissolves into a 1923 winter where the same child—now christened Little Stranger—skips rope on a frozen Hudson while millionaires burn their stock certificates for warmth. Secrets gestate: the pawn ticket traces back to a blood-flecked glove in Evelyn’s hope-chest; Earl’s silhouettes morph into crime-scene dossiers; Lucy’s backstage trunk hides adoption papers forged the night the Zeus Theatre caught fire. When the Gosnell estate is auctioned for back-taxes, the foundling’s lullaby becomes the gavel’s crack. In the final reel, the child speaks—first word, first accusation—‘Mama,’ aimed at no one and everyone, while the camera retreats through a keyhole into the auditorium, leaving us clutching our programmes, wondering whose name is pencilled on the cast list of our own lives.
Review Excerpt
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Welcome Little Stranger is less a film than a séance held inside a pawnshop: every frame smells of camphor, gin, and the metallic tang of secret money changing hands under the counter. Directed with icy detachment by the otherwise-forgotten James Montgomery Flagg—better known for his wartime posters—this 1923 First National release masquerades as a society melodrama while slyly rewriting the grammar of American Gothic. You come expecting orphan-pathos; you leave with the unsettling suspicion..."
