The story of a crook who achieves regeneration through association rather than reformation through faith. It is a slow and arduous process till he realizes his way-of-life is not life's best way.


The first time we see Joseph J. Dowling’s nameless grifter, he is licking cigar smoke off his knuckles as if it were sacramental wine. The gesture—caught in a harsh arc-light that turns the smoke into ectoplasm—announces the film’s creed: belief is gesture, nothing more. Over the next seventy-five minutes director Per...

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

Tom Forman

Dallas M. Fitzgerald
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" The first time we see Joseph J. Dowling’s nameless grifter, he is licking cigar smoke off his knuckles as if it were sacramental wine. The gesture—caught in a harsh arc-light that turns the smoke into ectoplasm—announces the film’s creed: belief is gesture, nothing more. Over the next seventy-five minutes director Perley Poore Sheehan refuses the spiritual shortcuts hawked by contemporaries like The Lonesome Chap or the moral neon of No Money, No Fun. Instead we get a slow bruise of a narrative..."
Perley Poore Sheehan, Waldemar Young
United States


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