Summary
Beneath the gaslight grandeur of Manhattan’s velvet parlors, Olive Muir—pearl-draped, spine of spun glass—presides over a world that curtsies to her every whim until a lone knock ricochets through the townhouse: Alice Prentice, drab as a sparrow, clutching a letter that smells of gin and working-class truth. The same night, Olive’s presumed pedigree—purchased in silk and sealed in governess French—shatters when her real sire, Prentice Senior, staggers across the Aubusson rug, howling paternity like a banshee with a bar tab. Reeling from the revelation that she is not the azure-blooded heiress but the cast-off kin of a Bowery sot, Olive boards a westward train, its whistle a scalpel slicing the satin of her old life. In the dusty frontier town she finds her birth mother fevered, the Prentice shack leaning like a drunk against merciless prairie wind, and herself suddenly fluent in calloused hands and lye soap. Yet squalor breeds its own operas: political czar Kavanaugh—eyes agate, breath of cigar and subjugation—covets Olive as both ornament and leverage over her weak-livered father; across the plank sidewalk, incorruptible D.A. Kent Ordway, profile cut from a coin, treats her as citizen, woman, possible beloved. When Kavanaugh’s death-squad slinks toward Ordway’s clapboard cottage, Olive barters the last of her pride for a warning whispered through trembling lips; what follows is a tarantella of fists, gunpowder, and kerosene lamplight in which Prentice paternal blood soaks the floorboards, a sacrificial libation to absolve a daughter he barely knew. Returning East, Olive confronts the final coup de grâce: Dick, her marble-carved fiancé, and Alice—once the interloper—now fused in a gaze so intimate it could solder iron. With a grace learned in hardship, Olive steps aside, then turns to Ordway, the man who saw not an heiress nor a pauper but a soul worth dying for, and utters the three syllables that remake her anew.
Synopsis
In New York City, haughty society girl Olive Muir is engaged to a man named Dick. Olive objects when Alice Prentice, a girl of lower station, comes to visit her family. After Alice's drunken father visits the Muir home, Olive is horrified to learn that she was adopted and that Mr. Prentice is her real father. Humbled, Olive leaves for the West to see her newfound mother, who is ill, and stay with the Prentices. There she becomes involved in a political battle between Kavanaugh, a political boss who desires Olive and controls her father, and Kent Ordway, a district attorney who befriends Olive. Getting wind of a plan to kill Ordway, Olive convinces her father to warn the young man; a huge fight breaks out in Ordway's house, in which Kavanaugh kills Prentice. Back in the Muir home, Olive learns that Dick, her fiancé, and Alice have fallen in love. Olive clears the way for their union, then tells Ordway that she loves him.
Review Excerpt
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The first time we see Olive Muir she is a cathedral of entitlement, lacework rising like Gothic spires around her throat, eyes two cobalt stained-glass windows admitting no light inward. Director John B. O’Brien lets the camera linger until the glamour itself becomes a character—one that will soon be flayed alive.
Silent-era audiences, drunk on The American Beauty’s parade of orchid-festooned debutantes, thought they knew the recipe: take one platinum heiress, season with a sprig of harmless ..."
