Summary
Nora, a threadbare ingenue whose livelihood depends on shimmying across splintered boards as Little Eva in a moth-eaten ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ troupe, finds her already-fragile cosmos implode when a sheriff’s writ snatches away her trunks, her pay, and the last illusion that greasepaint equals security. She vaults onto a moonlit freight, trades one terror for another when a lascivious tramp corners her, and tumbles—bruised, coat-shredded, half-starved—into the gas-lamp hush of Wattelville. The local constabulary, mistaking theatrical kohl for criminal camouflage, claps her in a cell, but Ma Forbes—a maternal force as immovable as river stone—ushers the waif into a clapboard home warmed by apple pies and second chances. Nora’s surrogate brother, James, clerk of the town’s only bank, lives by ledgers and hymnals until two cigar-puffing confidence men, Pug Hennessy and Soup McCool, bait him into a smoky poker den; a single rigged hand saddles him with a debt that can be repaid only by rifling the vault he has sworn to protect. Cornered between ruin and shame, James pilfers three hundred dollars—small fortune, vast abyss. Nora, desperate to shield the only family she has known, masquerades as Velvet Mary, safecracker extraordinaire, to infiltrate the burglars’ scheme. On the stroke of the heist, gloved hand on nitro-soaked tumblers, she pivots: trips the burglar alarm, floods the marble foyer with sheriffs, and watches Pug and Soup vanish in handcuffs. Redemption ricochets through the marble corridors; James, conscience scoured, kneels, offers not restitution but a ring. Nora—who once measured life in crusts of bread—accepts, appetite finally sated, hunger permanently caged.
Synopsis
Impersonating Little Eva in a third-rate travelling production of Uncle Tom's Cabin fails to earn Nora enough for a square daily meal, and to make thing worse, her stage career comes to a sudden end when the sheriff arrives with a writ of seizure. Nora hops a passing freight but is frightened by a tramp, jumps off, and literally rolls into the town of Wattelville. After being arrested as a suspicious character, Nora is adopted by the kindly Ma Forbes, whose son James works in the local bank. "Pug" Hennessy and "Soup" McCool, two crooks, inveigle the scrupulously honest James into a poker game and, as a result, he is forced to steal $300 from the bank to cover his losses. Impersonating expert safe-cracker Velvet Mary, Nora helps the crooks to break into the bank, but upon opening the safe, she sounds the alarm, and the crooks are arrested. Having learned his lesson, James proposes to Nora, who never again is forced to go hungry.
Review Excerpt
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A nickelodeon phantasmagoria stitched from mothballs and moral lightning, When Do We Eat? lands like a slap of winter wind across the cheeks of anyone who still believes silent cinema merely fluttered its lashes at innocence.
Picture the Edison arc lights guttering out in a Kansas fairground tent, the canvas sides flapping like exhausted lungs; that is the world our Nora—Enid Bennett at her most luminously gaunt—haunts at the start. She is Little Eva, yes, but a Little Eva who has learned tha..."
