If You Believe It, It's So

A nickel-plated confidence man, all shark-grin and pocket-watch patter, drifts through boardwalk arcades and river-town tabernacles, trading mirages for coin until a traveling tent-show of misfits—quack doctor, faded diva, one-armed juggler—absorbs him like a stain. No altar call, no thunderbolt; instead, the crook is sandpapered by proximity: shared stew-pots, borrowed overcoats, the slow osmosis of other people’s grief. When the troupe’s coffers thin, he slips back into marked cards and rigged roulette, but each grift now leaves a metallic aftertaste. The crisis arrives not in a church but in a moonlit lot where the Ferris wheel stalls; a child’s dropped candy apple becomes the mirror he can no longer smear. He unpicks his last three-card trick, returns the coin, and stays to pitch tents for pennies, discovering that regeneration is less halo than callus—skin thick enough to feel the cold without stealing a coat. The film ends on a foggy quay at dawn, the camera retreating as he whistles off to load crates for a steamer, neither saint nor scoundrel, merely a man who has learned to stand still without pocketing anything.