Summary
A silk-stocking Manhattanite, Kane Halliday, is hurled from penthouse to punch-drunk canvas when his father’s fortune evaporates overnight; the Ivy League grin that once opened club doors must now trade jabs in smoky, sawdust-scented clubs where gaslight clings to blood-slick ropes. Across eighteen brisk two-reel capers—each a miniature pop-culture fresco—Halliday dons tattered trunks, learns that a left hook buys more breakfast than a stock certificate, and discovers an anarchic camaraderie with cigar-chomping corner-men, brass-knuckled bookies, and a wisecrack-slinging sparring partner whose liver-punch timing rivals Buster Keaton’s pratfalls. The narrative pirouettes between prizefight suspense and screwball repartee: a society dame turned unlikely fight-crowd muse, a crooked promoter who stuffs contracts like counterfeit bills into pinstriped pockets, a midnight freight-train ride that becomes a makeshift ring lit by locomotive headlamps. Every episode lands like a speed-bag flurry—swift, self-contained, yet accruing a mosaic of Jazz-Age masculinity, class vertigo, and the sweet science’s brutal ballet. The Leather Pushers chronicles not merely Halliday’s scramble solvency but the kinetic metamorphosis of a golden boy into a street-smart scrapper whose bruised cheekbones refract the flicker of marquee bulbs, subway sparks, and the first tremors of the Great Crash still echoing off Wall Street marble.
Synopsis
The Leather Pushers were a charming series of eighteen 2-reel comedies based upon the story of a prize-fighter from the Colliers articles by H.C. Witwer. Each episode was self-contained and complete in itself. Formerly wealthy Kane Halliday (Reginald Denny) finds he must support himself with his fists in the ring after his father goes suddenly broke. A great mix of comedy and action set against the gritty world of the old New York boxing scene.
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