黄金国 (1921)

19th century, it boasts the virtues and vices of its genre. The virtues are a lurid plot (involving a hothouse strip joint, illegitimate, sickly children, callous aristocrats, an arranged marriage, attempted rape etc)., which runs the gamut of extreme emotions, from passion and cruelty to terror and hate. And, in its story of a woman tossed aside by her bored, socially superior lover, forced to gyrate for leering strangers to pay for her son's medicine; and a young girl forced into wedlock with an impotent old bore, there is a critical dimension about society and the way it treats women.