Summary
Lower East Side gaslight glints off switchblades and tarnished ideals as Kid Kelly—gum-chewing, collar-up poet of petty larceny—storms Goldberg’s millinery, only to have his swagger punctured by Flo Haines, a wisp of a woman clutching apartment keys like rosary beads. In the hush that follows the botched heist, bluecoats misread the silhouettes and pin the crime on Flo; chivalry, long dormant in Kelly’s ribcage, jolts awake—he cuffs himself, surrendering the only freedom he’s ever known. Two years of stone corridors and iron regimen later, he emerges into a city whose skyscrapers have grown taller than his nightmares, tracking Flo to a sweat-reeking loft where paper carnations bloom beneath exhausted fingers, and to a candle-lit mission where salvation is ladled in tin cups. Mamie, brassy mistress of the dive-bar limelight, spiking gin with possessive venom, lures Flo into a velvet trap, delivering her drug-drowsy to Joe Carelli, factory satyr in silk waistcoat. Kelly crashes the den, fists writing redemption in bruised couplets across Carelli’s smirk; dawn finds the magnate splayed on Persian rug, a dagger’s aria silencing his appetites. The gallows drum begins to beat for Kelly until Annie, scorned seamstress with ink-black eyes, confesses the stabbing—her fury a scarlet thread woven through the film’s moral tapestry. Liberty regained, Kelly trades bullets for vows, marrying Flo under the mission’s rough-hewn cross, the city’s clangor transposed into a fragile hymn of second chances.
Synopsis
Kid Kelly, a gangster in New York's Lower East Side, attempts to rob Goldberg's millinery store. When the police arrive, Flo Haines, who had come to the building to look at an apartment, hides. When the police find her, they charge her with the crime, but the Kid turns himself over to the law instead. After his release, he again meets Flo, who works in an artificial-flower factory by day and at Reverend Roberts' relief mission by night. The Kid soon falls in love with Flo, and his jealous sweetheart Mamie tricks her into coming to her apartment, where she drugs her and turns her over to Joe Carelli, the flower factory's lustful owner. The Kid saves Flo, but when Carelli is found murdered the next day, he is arrested for the crime. The confession of Annie, who had stabbed Carelli in a jealous rage, frees The Kid, who reforms himself and marries Flo.
