Lolly-Pop's Daughter

A melting taffeta dream of Lower-East-Side tenements, Tom Bret’s Lolly-Pop’s Daughter smuggles a pocket-sized myth through the gum-specked cobblestones of 1916 New York. The film’s sole reel unspools like a feverish lullaby: a penniless huckster named Lolly-Pop—his handlebar moustache waxed into twin exclamation points—sells penny candy by day and sleeps inside a pawnshop cello case by night. One winter dusk he rescues an abandoned infant from a horse trough, wraps her in red-and-white peppermint paper, and christens her Lilibet. Years collapse into seconds via jump-cuts of sugar-clouded skies, bootblacked newspapers, and the child’s cardboard ballet slippers dancing across clothesline shadows. When the city’s child-catchers arrive with black satchels and moral arithmetic, Lolly-Pop barters his tongue (literally—scissors flash, a cherry-stained lump of flesh drops into a tin pail) for one more hour with the girl. The final tableau is a stained-glass hallucination: the mute peddler, now mouthless, pulls a hot-air balloon made of candy wrappers toward an East River sunrise, Lilibet inside the basket waving with licorice fingers while tenement windows flare like roman-candle eyes. No intertitles survive; the story breathes only through Billy Ruge’s elastic pantomime and the flicker of hand-tinted frames that bleed raspberry light every time love is mentioned.