Summary
In a velvet-lined Manhattan drawing room where gaslight licks the damask like a guilty tongue, financier Raymond Edwardes—equal parts Gilded Age colossus and self-maiming satyr—trades the quiet devotion of wife Marion and the luminous trust of child Vivian for the acrid perfume of Lucille Stanton, adventuress-cum-predator wrapped in peacock silks. While Marion, draped in moonlit resignation, attends a reception on the arm of Frederick Barton—family confidant and unspoken caryatid of rectitude—Raymond slips into Lucille’s boudoir, a hothouse of cracked mirrors and rust-colored champagne. Left behind, adolescent Alice—Raymond’s sister, all knees and unshed poems—becomes quarry to Bob Gardner, betrothed to Raymond’s elder sister Florence; in a single shutter-click of violence Bob’s savagery rewrites the house’s DNA. That same midnight, Raymond discovers Frederick inside Lucille’s chamber, the two men locking eyes over the tangle of sheets and moral wreckage. Shame detonates; Raymond crawls home, knees bloodied by cobblestones of remorse, begging Marion’s absolution even as news arrives that Frederick—avenging angel or mere hot-blooded fool—has pulped Bob’s skull in a dockside brawl. Bob’s brother Dick, freighted with ancestral guilt, offers marriage to violated Alice as if a ring could cauterize a soul. The film ends on a winter beach: Marion’s veil of forgiveness flutters like a torn flag, Alice stares at Dick’s proffered hand as though it were a hook, and Raymond, stripped of delusions, watches the tide erase footprints he can no longer claim as his own.
Synopsis
Despite the pleading of his wife Marion and his little daughter Vivian, Raymond Edwardes intensifies his affair with a charming adventuress named Lucille Stanton. Marion attends a reception with Frederick Barton one evening, leaving Raymond free to visit Lucille and leaving Raymond's younger sister Alice alone in the house. Bob Gardner, who is engaged to Raymond's elder sister Florence, rapes Alice, and that same evening, Raymond finds Frederick in Lucille's room. Realizing the great pain he has caused his wife, Raymond asks for Marion's forgiveness. Bob is killed in a fight with Frederick, whereupon his brother, Dick Gardner, offers to marry Alice to atone for Bob's wrong.
Review Excerpt
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There are silents that merely flicker; then there is When Men Betray, a 1913 time-bomb Ivan Abramson smuggled past Edison’s trust under plain brown wrapping. One emerges from its sixty-five minutes reeling, as if someone has swapped the rosewater in the atomizer for carbolic acid.
The plot, deceptively drawing-room, is a switchblade. Raymond Edwardes—embodied by Robert Elliott with the panther languor of a man who has never heard the word no—opens the film by crushing his silk top-hat like a w..."
