Summary
A bastion of Northern capital, Standish, abandons his rawboned mountain bride for the porcelain allure of the urbane Emily, leaving infant Primrose to echo in the hollows of her mother’s forsaken cradle. Years later, the girl—now a paradox of backwoods sap and cultivated bloom—returns to the marble corridors of her father’s regret. She storms his gilded cage masquerading as a half-feral child of the hollers, all tangled hair and barbed tongue, yet every curtsy she botches only tightens the lasso around two hearts: the repentant patriarch and his ward Jack, a reformed rake shackled by a whiskey-soaked marriage to a Parisian dancer. When the creditor Newton demands Primrose’s hand as payment for her father’s debts, the masquerade combusts: at a gaslit ball she doffs her homespun skin, unfurls deeds to oil-rich hills, and trades crude land for her father’s redemption while a scarred secretary recognizes the dancer as his own long-lost wife, dissolving Jack’s phantom vows and freeing the wild primrose to bloom at last in unfettered love.
Synopsis
Standish, a wealthy Northerner, deserts his untutored Southern wife shortly after their daughter Primrose's birth, preferring to wed the cultured but haughty Emily. After her mother's death, Primrose is placed in the care of her uncle, who rears her as a refined and educated young lady. Longing for his daughter, Standish sends for her, and although Primrose, deeply resentful of her father, exaggerates the role of the uncouth mountain girl, he and his ward, Jack Wilton, come to love her deeply. Jack, who secretly married a dancer named Marie in a moment of drunken infatuation, reforms under Primrose's influence, but Newton, a broker to whom Standish is deeply in debt, demands her hand in marriage as his repayment. Primrose rejects Newton, and at a ball, she appears as her true self and offers her father some of her oil rich lands. After Standish has repaid Newton, his secretary recognizes Marie as his long-lost wife, leaving Jack free to marry his "wild" Primrose.
Director
