Summary
In the half-lit back-alleys of a nameless metropolis that looks suspiciously like a cracked fun-house mirror of 1910s Manhattan, Artless Artie—nicknamed for his spectacular inability to fake a smile—trawls through pawnshops and burlesque revues searching for the vanished silhouette of his brother, a street-corner illusionist who once swallowed fire and spat out origami doves. Every storefront he enters exhales a different decade: nickelodeon posters curl like autumn tongues, trolley bells clang in ghost time, and a wax-cylinder rendition of “Silver Threads Among the Gold” bleeds from a second-story window whose glass is already starred by a bullet hole nobody remembers firing. Harry Fox, all restless elbows and eyes that seem to have misplaced their sockets, plays Artie as a walking interrogation mark, forever tilting forward as though the world itself were a bannister he must slide down. Around him swirl a carnival of con artists, suffragette sharpshooters, and a child contortionist who folds herself into envelopes and mails her innocence to out-of-state relatives. The plot, if one insists on linearity, concerns a counterfeited Michelangelo drawing said to contain a map to the brother’s last whereabouts; but the film’s pulse is less a scavenger hunt than a slow-motion striptease of American identity itself—each reel peels off another layer of varnish until the bare wood underneath reveals the scribbled confession that the whole country is an alley-dwelling twin searching for a face it lost in a funhouse. By the time Artie finally corners the illusionist—now a chalk-skinned MC in a vaudeville of the damned—the screen fractures into split-panel triptychs, irising circles, and hand-tinted scarlets that drip like fresh slaughterhouse paint. The closing shot freezes on Artie’s first authentic grin: teeth like broken piano keys, eyes finally in focus, the city behind him dissolving into a hand-cranked blur that might be sunrise or might be the projector jamming, refusing to let anyone leave the theater with clean fingernails.
Review Excerpt
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A nickelodeon piano crashes into a funeral march, and suddenly the 1918 audience—hats still on, corsets still tight—realizes they’ve been lured not into escapism but into an autopsy. Artless Artie arrives like a bloodstained postcard mailed from the id of a nation busy selling Liberty Bonds by day and snorting ether by night. There are no title cards announcing theme; instead, the film’s first image is a boot heel grinding a dropped ice-cream cone into the pavement while a child watches, unbli..."
