Summary
A marble-hearted industrial baron, Mr. Kendall, dispatches a lacquered carriage through fog-choked boulevards to retrieve the son he once exiled at birth; en route, the boy evaporates into urban vapour like a conjurer’s coin. Meanwhile, beneath gas-lamps that flutter like dying suns, a nameless woman abandons a ragged cherub in the wagon of Niccolo Darini, a scrap-metal poet whose fingers smell of copper and rain. The foundling becomes the axis on which two galaxies spin: Kendall’s cash-cold cosmos of ledgers and inheritances, and Niccolo’s candle-lit realm of gnarled hands, spaghetti dinners, and lullabies hummed in Neapolitan. When newsprint screams a five-thousand-dollar reward, the city’s idyll fractures; jealous suitors, blue-coated gendarmes, and a death-bed beggar weave a triptych of mistaken identity, until the child—first lost in transit, now lost in bureaucracy—bounces between fathers like a ballad’s refrain. In the final reel, cheques flutter like white doves, wedding bells replace sirens, and the camera tilts skyward, asking whether blood or tenderness owns the patent on paternity.
Synopsis
Mr. Kendall, a wealthy man who had sent his infant son to a home after the death of his mother at birth, decides that it is time for his son to come home. On his carriage ride to the father he has never seen, however, the boy mysteriously disappears. At the same time, a woman deposits a little boy on the cart of Italian junk man Niccolo Darini, and then disappears. Niccolo becomes strongly attached to the waif, and although his neighbors advise him to take the child to the police, he refuses. Kendall posts a reward notice in the paper for the return of his son, and when Niccolo's rival for the hand of the beautiful Nita Lapi reads the notice, he tells the police of Niccolo's ward. Niccolo is forced to give up his little charge, which breaks his heart. However, the Kendall's rightful heir is found when a beggar, run over by a car, confesses on his death bed that the child with him is really the Kendall boy. Niccolo's beloved ward is then returned to him, along with a check from Kendall for $5,000 dollars. Niccolo's happiness is made complete when Nita agrees to marry him.
