Summary
A tarnished soul named Chick Hewes—his name already a bruise—steps out of a stone-mouth prison into a metropolis that greets him with the warmth of a guillotine. The air tastes of coal smoke and unpaid debts; every cobblestone remembers his former footfalls. He swears, this time, to scrape the soot from his conscience, to trade the lock-pick for a lunch-pail, yet the city’s machinery of virtue has no slot for a reformed gear. Detectives dog his shadow, sneering at his refusal to turn canary; across the alley, a slum child is flattened beneath the ivory wheels of Jerry Brandon’s Packard, the crunch of small bones drowned by the laughter of the DA’s golden heir. Chick’s vow detonates. One last vault, he mutters: the brand-new safe in the Brandon brownstone where justice itself keeps its jewels. Inside the mahogany study he finds Jerry already elbows-deep in filial larceny, stuffing bonds into a silk handkerchief. A gun glints, a maid screams, and Molly—Jerry’s half-sister, her eyes twin revolvers of pity—steps between the two thieves, rewriting fate with a single lie. At dawn Chick and Molly board a westbound freight, the city’s roar thinning into prairie wind, their future unwritten on the blank slate of horizon.
Synopsis
Chick Hewes resolves to go straight when he is released from prison, but persecution by the police when he refuses to be a stool pigeon and the lack of concern with which Jerry Brandon kills a slum child with his automobile impel Chick to undertake one more job--at the home of District Attorney Brandon. There Chick discovers Jerry already stealing from his father's safe, but Molly Brandon prevents Chick from being arrested for Jerry's crime. Chick and Molly go west to begin anew.
Director
Cast
