His Country Cousin

A rust-belt metropolis, half-asleep under sooty el-tracks, belches steam while a hayseed cousin—overall straps starched stiff as morality itself—steps off the rattling milk-train clutching a carpetbag stuffed with bucolic innocence and a single letter promising ‘a soft berth in the big smoke.’ What follows is less plot than a slow-motion collision between agrarian myth and urban entropy: skyscraper shadows swallow his sunburnt naïveté, jazz dives detune his fiddle, and every neon promise peels like cheap gilt until the city coughs him back onto the midnight prairie, pockets turned out, grin crooked but unbroken. The film’s true protagonist is modernity’s glare—King and La Cava let it refract through slapstick pratfalls, expressionist silhouettes, and a chiaroscuro drunk-sequence that feels borrowed from a German fever dream. By the time the cousin re-boards the westbound local, the metropolis has not reformed him; it has merely etched its asphalt sigil onto his retinas, a souvenir both luminous and lethal.