In 1937 Marlon Rambler, 67, an alcoholic movie photographer for 20th Century Fox News, loses a kneecap on the Yang-tze while aboard the U.S. Gunboat Panay when Japanese planes attack the ship. Back home in Greenwich Village, crippled and awaiting a gold kneecap, Marlon is led by his dear friend playwright Eugene O'Neill, himself a recovered alcoholic, into the care of Dr. Marie-Louise van der Streep, a white-headed Dutch virgin about to turn eighty,...