Nellie, The Beautiful Coat Model

Examiner of Plays' Summary:

A new American variant of the old transpontine melodrama. Its heroine is the mannequin at a New York store, where the jealous manageress, Hortense, and her vicious lover, Walter, discover her to be a long lost daughter of Walter's millionaire aunt, whose fortune he will inherit if his cousin, the mannequin, does not turn up. The wicked pair, therefore deliberately scheme first for the innocent girl's ruin, and failing that for her death. In their plotting, not less crazy than malevolent, they are aided by their victim's drunken good-for-nothing uncle, who lives on her earnings. Arrayed in opposition to them are the old drunkard's crippled boy, who is the heroine's prodigy, her colleagues at the store, Ike the comic Hebrew porter - whom she has befriended in his illness - and Polly the comic cash girl and of course her own harmless necessary lover. They all have their protective work cut out for them. The attacks made on the heroine by the male and female villains include her attempted seduction, and her attempted murder, first by throwing her out of a Boarding house window onto the elevated railway track, next by crushing her under a lift, next by drawing her from the deck of a yacht, next by bombing her car when it was crossing a bridge in a snow storm, and finally by drugging and stabbing her before a masked ball. The providence, however, which shapes the happy ends of dramas such as these, watched over her throughout; and there is always at hand a comic friend or a sentimental one to save her from her desperate enemies. Possibly popular, and entirely inoffensive in its ingenious crudity. Ernest A. Bendall.