Summary
A slate-gray dawn breaks over the penitentiary yard as Jimmy Doyle—his name already a bruise on the city’s tongue—steps into air that tastes of rust and second chances, clutching a single photograph of nightclub chanteuse Nancy Preston whose smile once flickered like a nickelodeon bulb. One frame earlier, Doyle’s heartbeat had been auctioned off by Detective James Tierny, a copper whose badge glints like a guillotine blade; the detective’s perjury stitched Doyle into a striped suit for a jewel heist that never belonged to him. Now free, Doyle strides through rain-slick streets toward a diner neon-signed “EAT,” where Nancy’s torch song still hangs in the coffee steam, and he vows—quiet as dice sliding across felt—to forge a square life with her or die loading the chambers. The vow lasts exactly twelve hours: old confederates, smelling of gin and panic, lure him into a warehouse hustle that ends with another planted revolver, another guilty verdict, another iron-barred dusk. But this prison is a paper box; Doyle burns through it, vaults a freight train under a hemorrhaging moon, and arrives back in the city just as Nancy is being auctioned by Dave Monteith, a former partner whose grin is all molars and menace. Monteith dies under a haze of cordite, not by Doyle’s hand but by that of a jittery accomplice whose silhouette dissolves like ink in water—yet the city’s echo chamber pins the corpse to Doyle. The lovers flee to a whistle-stop called Ashville, a place so quiet even ghosts speak in whispers, where Doyle’s half-forgotten medical textbooks earn him a post as aide in his uncle’s sanatorium: corridors of chloroform, ether dreams, and nuns gliding like swans. Tierney, driven by vendetta and dyspepsia, tracks them down only to collapse with a ruptured appendix; on the operating table his life balances on Doyle’s trembling scalpel. Doyle slices, saves, and in that crucible of flesh and forgiveness Tierney’s hatred drains away, replaced by a slow, astonished grace. Telegrams arrive: the true killer confessed. Tierney tips his hat, the couple board a westbound dawn, and the dice finally settle on seven.
Synopsis
After serving his time for a crime he did not commit, ex-convict Jimmy Doyle is determined to go straight for the one he loves, Nancy Preston. Thereafter, Doyle notifies the man who framed him, Detective James Tierny, that any further false accusations will result in his death. Double-crossed by former pals, Doyle is sent back to prison but escapes in time to rescue Nancy from Dave Monteith, one of the colleagues who betrayed him. But when Monteith is killed by an accomplice, suspicion points to Doyle as the murderer. Desperate, he and Nancy run away to a small town where, because he once studied medicine, he becomes an assistant in his uncle's hospital. Meanwhile, Tierney is closing in on Doyle when he suffers an attack of appendicitis from which only Doyle can save him. Resisting his baser feelings, Doyle performs the operation and saves his foe's life. Finally, word arrives that the real murderer has been found, then Tierney gives Doyle and Nancy his blessings.
Review Excerpt
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Somewhere between the first electric flicker of a projector and the last gasp of the nickelodeon boom, Dice of Destiny tumbled into cinemas like a pair of ivory cubes skittering across green felt—seemingly random, yet every bounce pre-loaded. Viewed today, the 1920 one-reel wonder feels less like relic than revelation: its grayscale gloom predates the brooding fatalism of later noir, its moral algebra predates the surgical ethics of Erstwhile Susan and the institutional rot exposed in Communis..."
