Ewa Cybulski and her sister sail to New York from their native Poland in search of a new start and the American dream. When they reach Ellis Island, doctors discover that Magda is ill, and the two women are separated. Ewa is released onto the mean streets of Manhattan while her sister is quarantined. Alone, with nowhere to turn and desperate to reunite with Magda, Ewa quickly falls prey to Bruno, a charming but wicked man who takes her in and forces...

Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, the film takes up with a distant and soft-spoken woman, who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men, one being a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme.

In New York City in the 1870s, a rigid social code governs how people talk, walk, meet, part, dine, earn their livings, fall in love, and marry. Not a word of the code is written down anywhere, but these people have been studying it since they were born. In this elegant milieu, marriages, like treaties between nations, exist to provide for the orderly transmission of wealth; scions of old and rich families understand that their personal desires have...