Cops

A lone everyman, half poet and half rag-doll, drifts through a city that metastasizes into one colossal prank machine. One moment he’s courting a flaxen-haired secretary beside a shopfront window, the next he’s cradling a purloined crate of contraband that looks suspiciously like a prop from a biblical farce. A mistaken identity ricochets through the streets, each wrong turn magnetizing patrolmen, detectives, mounted lancers, bloodhounds, motorcycle posses, and eventually an entire battalion of Keystone-style militia. The metropolis itself seems to sprout batons and badges; brick walls hinge open to reveal fresh squadrons, streetcars unspool into flying armadas, and every alley dead-ends into a cartoonish tribunal of justice. Our hero’s only weapons are centrifugal grace and a face that registers catastrophe with the serenity of a monk discovering levitation. He commandeers motorcycles, ladders, collapsing fire-escapes, a runaway hot-air balloon, and finally a freight train whose coupling pins uncouple like punch-line buttons. The chase corkscrews from slapstick to existential panic, then loops back into slapstick again, until the civic hysteria climaxes in a cyclone of blue uniforms, billy clubs, and a final iris-out that feels half like absolution, half like a wanted poster dissolving into myth.