In this fantastical film, a young girl conjures its story from the lines of a chalk circle. Once upon a time, in 1915, a German saboteur arrived to Manhattan to interrupt the export of American munitions to Britain. He soon found a collaborator in a wayward stevedore who unwittingly led him to a group of labor anarchists. Sabotage soon turned these bedfellows into agents of the other's tragic end. How America entered World War 1 playfully plays out through archival images and the theatrical rendition of lives as they might have been lived.
From 1914 to 1917 a neutral America profits from the export of munitions to their British Allies. As American bullets kill more and more Germans, the Kaiser sends Captain Franz von Rintelen to New York City on a covert plan to sabotage the production and export of munitions. Rintelen names his project The Manhattan Front.Our story follows a young stenographer, Janey, as she arrives to Manhattan seeking her independence. She finds work as for Ward Moorehouse, a lobbyist who represents industrialists in petroleum and munitions. The Moorehouse firm's position to enjoy unparalleled industrial profit becomes threatened by labor agitation in New Jersey and the revolution in Mexico. As strikers demand the 8-hour workday, Janey's friend Mac introduces her to the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) at Harbor Pub meetings led by soap-boxer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. When Rintelen needs dockworkers to implement his plot, an old acquaintance, vaudeville chanteuse Lenore, sends him an Irish stevedore. As Rintelen suspects, the Irish hate the British as much as the Germans do. These stories collide in betrayals and suspicious alliances that come to their conclusion in the destruction of the munitions depot of Black Tom Island in 1916; the final event on The Manhattan Front that leads the nation to war. Staged akin to a silent film, this plot is interwoven with never-before-seen motion pictures from the extensive World War 1 collection at the National Archive (Washington, D.C.) and a fantastical thread of children at play with their miniature dollhouse. Through a vertiginous swirl of dreamlike images the film arrives to its arresting conclusion.
