A bank clerk forges a check to help his girlfriend's father. He's found out, but instead of being arrested he becomes a member of a gang of forgers.
There is a moment, barely twenty-eight minutes into Jim the Penman, when the camera lingers on the trembling cuff of a clerk as it grazes the iron-gall ink like a clandestine lover. That tremor—caught in a ghostly iris-in—contains the entire moral tremor of the picture: a world where parchment is more potent than pist...
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Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.
Kenneth S. Webb
Kenneth S. Webb
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" There is a moment, barely twenty-eight minutes into Jim the Penman, when the camera lingers on the trembling cuff of a clerk as it grazes the iron-gall ink like a clandestine lover. That tremor—caught in a ghostly iris-in—contains the entire moral tremor of the picture: a world where parchment is more potent than pistol, and where respectability curdles into rascality with the whisper of a nib across foolscap. The Alchemy of Paper and Guilt Adapted from the once-famous Victorian potboiler by S..."
Charles Coghlan
Dorothy Farnum, Charles Lawrence Young
United States
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