Rented Trouble

A boarding-house matron, perpetually one rent-cheque from destitution, leases her spare room to a traveling conjurer whose suitcase spills moonlit secrets: counterfeit banknotes, a pearl-handled revolver, and a photograph of Vera Reynolds—boarder, cigarette-girl, part-time dreamer—wearing nothing but a mermaid’s sequined tail. Overnight the house tilts; Eddie Barry, a milk-truck driver who has loved Vera since she used to steal cream from his crates, discovers the magician’s ledger of IOUs scribbled in disappearing ink. Bills vanish, shoes reappear on the wrong feet, and the parlour clock strikes thirteen as tenants barter their last dignities for a seat at the hustler’s card table. Vera, sensing the carnivalesque rot beneath the wallpaper, barters something riskier—her reflection in the mirror—for a single ticket out, only to watch the train depart with every passenger wearing her face. The film ends in a pawnshop at dawn: the conjurer hocks the revolver, Vera hocks the tail, Eddie hocks the truck, and the landlady, clutching a fistful of genuine cash, realizes the rent was never the problem—gravity was.