Going Straight

A kaleidoscope of sooty tenements and flickering arc-lamps, Going Straight stalks the razor-thin line between penitence and recidivism as Billy West’s reformed pickpocket, fresh from the clink, trawls a city that refuses to believe a leopard can change its rosettes. Each frame is a daguerreotype of 1920 anxiety: billboards leer with promises of easy loot, trolley bells clang like jury gavels, and a single misplaced wallet becomes the butterfly wing that stirs a hurricane of suspicion. Theodore Lorch’s granite-jawed detective shadows the ex-con with the relentless patience of a gothic gargoyle, while Ethelyn Gibson’s dime-store angel wavers between salvation and betrayal, her close-ups so luminously grainy they feel etched by candle smoke. The plot corkscrews through pawn-shop crucibles, rain-slick rooftops, and a midnight mission breakfast that tastes of communion bread and sawdust, culminating in a trolley-car set-piece where guilt and innocence lurch toward each other like coupling trains. The film ends on a freeze-frame of a slammed gate—freedom or another trap?—leaving the audience to stew in the brine of moral ambiguity.