Manslaughter

Cecil B. De Mille's Jazz Age, "when pleasure drugged the conscience of its youth." The comely sinner (Leatrice Joy) is not bad, "simply speed-mad and geared too high," behind the wheel she races a locomotive as a little afternoon divertissement and then pays off a patrolman with one of her bejeweled bracelets. Next seen, she's about to dive into a bowl of champagne at a soiree that also includes pogo-stick races, showers of rose petals, and dancing snowmen. The disapproving district attorney (Thomas Meighan) likens it to ancient Rome, and sure enough... (The writhing pagan tableau imagines the heroine as a bouncy Messalina and the spoilsport as Attila, a dissolve from gladiatorial arena to foxy-boxing ring brings it back to the present.) "Rather a moist party for a little girl." The nobly suffering maid (Lois Wilson), virtuous yin to the heiress' dissolute yang, swipes one of her mistress' baubles to finance her ailing son's treatment and is promptly convicted. Joy's turn in the slammer follows when the prosecutor prescribes tough-love in the wake of a tragic joyride—the karmic outcome, worthy of a Robert Minor cartoon, finds the bourgeois ninny scrubbing floors and dragging garbage pails behind bars. "Thus must the Day of Reckoning come." Parallel salvation strands converge at the slums on New Year's Eve, though not before DeMille the Griffith of Snark has his poor little rich girl spot the sketch artist at her trial just so she can adjust her furs. Meighan alone in his flat with a whiskey bottle is vividly recalled by Powell and Pressburger in The Small Back Room. With John Miltern, George Fawcett, and Julia Faye. In black and white.