Summary
Francine D’Espard, a luminous Parisian sculptress turned wartime nurse, meets dough-eyed American artillery captain William Holliday amid the sulphuric hists of Verdun; their vows are whispered beneath a sky hemorrhaging flares. Trans-Atlantic cables later, William lands in Manhattan to find his family’s shipping empire gutted by Ezekiel Bates, a gilded-age hyena in white spats. Enter Susan Bates, the rival’s porcelain heiress, whose arranged engagement to William is pure ledger ink. When Francine disembarks at Ellis Island, valise stuffed with lace hopes, she is met by headlines, not hymns. Betrayal calcifies into resolve: she infiltrates the Secret Service, weaponizes silk-stocking soirées, and weaponizes her own silhouette in a mirror-lined war of attrition. Through forged manifests, midnight chases on the Hudson, and coded waltzes in Washington’s marble labyrinths, she stalks the man she still loves, convinced he has forgotten her. Only when a cache of carbon papers reveals Bates’s wartime profiteering—rifles sold to both armies—does Francine realize that William’s seeming treachery was a hostage performance, his heart shackled by blackmail. In a final tableau inside the echoing nave of Grand Central, she slaps irons on Bates, tears up the false engagement contract, and collapses into the arms of the soldier whose pulse has always beat in Morse for her.
Synopsis
During World War I, young Frenchwoman Francine D'Espard meets U.S. Army officer William Holliday at the front, and they become engaged. Returning to America, William finds his father at the mercy of his business rival, Ezekiel Bates. Shortly after, when Francine arrives in America to marry her fiancé, she is informed that her lover is about to marry Bates' daughter Susan. Her love now turning to hate, Francine devotes herself to the task of destroying her former suitor. Through her connections with the U.S. Secret Service, the two are involved in many adventures, and just as Francine is about to avenge herself, she discovers that Holliday has been true to her the whole time. Upon finding evidence that Bates, in addition to being the cause of all their troubles, has also defrauded the government, Francine has him arrested and finally reunites with her lover.
Review Excerpt
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The first time I saw What Women Want—not the Mel Gibson rom-com, but this spectral 1918 melodrama—I was alone in a climate-controlled vault at MoMA, the projector’s mechanical heartbeat louder than the bombardments onscreen. By the time the final cyan-tinted reel flared out, I felt as if someone had stitched my own ribcage into the film strip; that’s how intimately this silent juggernaut breathes.
Plot in Motion: Love as Ammunition
Director Garfield Thompson stages the Western Front like a fe..."
