In Again

Harry Sweet’s In Again is a sly, jazz-age fever dream in which a luckless vaudevillian, fresh from the county lock-up, ricochets through speakeasies, dime museums, and rooftop gardens searching for the one honest laugh that might rinse the tarnish off his name. The film opens in a pre-dawn prison yard where shadows stretch like accusations; a guard flips a nickel—the same coin our hero will later palm for bus fare—into the mud, and the metallic chime becomes the film’s leitmotif: freedom always costs exactly what you’ve got left. Outside, Manhattan is a kaleidoscope of neon sinners and nickel saints; every marquee promises reinvention, every alley delivers disillusion. Sweet, playing a character known only as ‘Kid’, hitchhikes on the running-board of a hearse, shares a cigarette with a chorine whose mascara runs in Gothic rivulets, and ends up impersonating a missing millionaire at a Long Island costume ball so decadent that even the statues are drunk. The plot pirouettes on mistaken identities, but its pulse is the ache of wanting to belong somewhere that doesn’t smell of disinfectant and despair. When the real tycoon reappears, the masquerade collapses like a soufflé at a fire drill, yet Buckingham’s script withholds easy penance; instead, the final reel dissolves into a shimmering ellipsis as Kid steps onto a west-bound freight, still clutching that mud-splattered nickel—now polished by his thumb into a miniature mirror reflecting every face he’ll never be.