Summary
A fun-fair barker with soot-black eyes and a carny’s swagger sells dreams spun from brass and sawdust, but the neon Eden he inhabits collapses into a purgatorial waltz once he knifes a customer and flees to the city’s shadowed ribs. There he courts a meek maid whose gaze still carries country starlight; they marry, yet marital bliss curdles when the law’s noose tightens. Cornered, the barker opts for a razor-blade exit, only to awaken aboard a spectral locomotive barreling toward a cosmic tribunal where his past is unspooled like nitrate ribbon. In a celestial bargain he is granted one terrestrial day to prove that even a tarnished soul can tilt toward grace: he must return as an unseen guardian to the pregnant widow he abandoned, guiding her and their unborn child toward daylight without ever revealing his ghostly hand. The film’s final reel trembles between transcendence and tragedy as dawn creeps over tenement roofs, and the barker—now stripped of bravado—watches his infant’s first breath before dissolving into the morning haze, a penitent silhouette swallowed by the same fairground lights that once promised immortality.
Synopsis
A somewhat disguised silent version of Molnar's "Liliom", released the same year that Molnar's play first opened on Broadway.
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