Brass Buttons

A fresh-minted constable, badge still mirror-bright, patrols a nameless East-Coast dream-city where trolley bells clang like cracked xylophones and sooty arc-lamps smear butterscotch halos on midnight snow. His bumbling zeal ricochets through tenement corridors, opium parlors, and a vaudeville house whose gilded balcony boxes resemble gaudy birdcages. Each time he jabs his nightstick into someone else’s murky business—be it a silk-hatted pickpocket, a suffragette chalking slogans, or a lovesick barber planning to elope with the mayor’s manicured daughter—the camera pirouettes so that the audience sees the slapstick dominoes topple from three angles at once. The narrative is less a straight line than a spilled box of buttons: each disc of brass spins, clatters, and eventually rolls back to the same green-gum sidewalk grate, where our rookie learns that meddling is both a civic virtue and a private curse. The film ends on a freeze-frame of his astonished grin, mouth agape like a broken coin bank, as confetti from a prematurely erupted New-Year’s blast drifts around his helmet.