Summary
A starry-eyed farm boy,Nick Fowler,chases the metropolitan mirage aboard a smoking iron serpent;en route he collides with celluloid illusionist Jimmie Keen and a phantom ingenue who evaporates,leaving only a monogrammed purse—an ivory talisman embossed with the name Gwendolyn Van Loon.The city swallows him whole:lobby boys bar the palace gates,neon promises corrode into soot,and every skyline spire turns into a question mark.Yet,in letters home,Nick lacquers defeat with gilt,spinning fables of triumph while moonlight drips like quicksilver through his boarding-house blinds.Chance—or perhaps the purse’s lingering spell—drops another photograph at his elbow;this one is proffered by a velvet-tongued swindler calling himself Lord Boniface Cheadle who recruits Nick as expendable muscle in a jewel-heist masquerade.Our guileless protagonist,now wearing the alias “Steve Diamond,”slips past the gilded doors of the Van Loon mansion,where staircases coil like albino pythons and parlors exhale lilac-scented conspiracies.Double identities ricochet:mistaken for the very crook he pretends to be,Nick tumbles through trapdoors of coincidence,until the real Cheadle—gaunt,panther-grin—escapes into fog while Nick wrestles chrome-plated revolvers and barking bulldogs under chandeliers that quiver like guilty consciences.Sirens ululate;flashbulbs detonate;the house folds inward like a paper theatre.And then—snap!—the curtain lifts to reveal the ultimate gag:every skyscraper,chase,and gunshot was merely pulp drafted by Nick himself,a campfire tale meant to dazzle Dad back in the wheat-stubbled hinterlands.But the cosmos loves a flamboyant liar:Keen reads the manuscript,eyes ignite,and the fiction metastasizes into contract ink.On the final iris-out,Nick strides a back-lot street,arm-in-arm with the flesh-and-blood Gwendolyn,while celluloid rain polishes the pavement to a mirror—New York reflecting its own dream back at itself.
Synopsis
Anxious to see the world, Nick Fowler boards a train bound for New York. On board he meets Jimmie Keen, a motion picture director, and sees a mysterious beautiful girl who leaves her purse behind. Nick retrieves the purse and inside it discovers a photo of the girl, inscribed with the name Gwendolyn Van Loon. After arriving in New York, Nick pays Keen a visit, but an impertinent office boy prevents him from seeing the director. After a series of similar disappointments in the big city, Nick continues to write glowing accounts of his life to his family back home. While he's writing a letter to his father one day, a guest at an adjoining desk drops a photo of Gwendolyn. The stranger introduces himself as Lord Boniface Cheadle, and Nick becomes an unwitting tool of the man who is in reality Steve Diamond, a crook. Under Cheadle's instructions, Nick goes to the Van Loon house and presents himself as Steve Diamond, which initiates a train of events that culminates in the escape of the real Lord Cheadle while Nick grapples with the crooks until the police arrive. It is then revealed that the whole adventure was invented by Nick to impress his dad, but when Keen reads the story, he is so impressed that he offers Nick a job as a scriptwriter and introduces him to the leading lady: Gwendolyn Van Loon.
Review Excerpt
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The nickelodeon gods of 1920 were in a puckish mood when they green-lit New York Luck,a film that treats Manhattan like an origami metropolis—fold,crease,tear,unfold—until the skyline resembles a paper cut-out silhouetted against lemon-yellow dawn.For modern viewers raised on algorithmic plot arcs,the picture’s looping Möbius-strip narrative feels almost crypto-viral:boy meets city,boy becomes city,boy authors city,boy ultimately cashes royalty checks from city.
The Pursuit as Palimpsest
Beg..."
