
While at the front during the Great War, Calvin Price dreams of the day he can return home to Masseyville and marry his sweetheart, Janie Cullison. Expecting a royal welcome upon his return, he is crestfallen when no one meets him at the train.

The locomotive exhales a final wheeze, steam curling like ghostly banderillas around Calvin Price’s hobnail boots; he is Odysseus minus the fanfare, Ithaca a clapboard main street fragrant with wet sawdust rather than salt spray. Director Lee Royal lets the camera linger on that empty platform until the viewer feels ...


Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.

Fred J. Butler

Robert N. Bradbury
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" The locomotive exhales a final wheeze, steam curling like ghostly banderillas around Calvin Price’s hobnail boots; he is Odysseus minus the fanfare, Ithaca a clapboard main street fragrant with wet sawdust rather than salt spray. Director Lee Royal lets the camera linger on that empty platform until the viewer feels the gravel grow fangs—an exquisite cruelty that announces the film’s governing logic: homecoming is not closure but laceration. What follows is a whiplash narrative of defamation ..."
Sophie Kerr, Lee Royal
United States

1930 · IMDb 5.3


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