Life's Greatest Problem

Two freight-hopping vagabonds—Big Steve, a hulking dreamer with a ukulele in his blanket roll, and Little Lefty, a wiry raconteur who can whistle entire Sousa marches—float downstream on boxcars made of starlight and cigar smoke until 1917 detonates their Eden. In a single smash-cut, the film’s sepia pastoral is ripped open by khaki recruitment posters whose eyes follow you like a cathedral gargoyle; the boys trade their bindles for rifles, their laughter for trench-foot, and their friendship for a blood pact sealed in gaseous fog. Kelly’s screenplay fractures time into jagged shards: a pre-war burlesque of hobo jungles dissolves into a hallucinated no-man’s-land where carousel horses rot among barbed wire, while on the home front Helen Ferguson’s Salvation Army lass distributes stale donuts like communion wafers to boys who will never again taste cinnamon. The final reel is a ghost waltz—Steve returns minus an arm and plus a morphine stare, Lefty absent altogether except as a silhouette scratched into the bunker wall, and the camera itself seems to overdose on phosphorous flare, staggering through a victory parade that looks suspiciously like a funeral cortege in disguise.