Round Two

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.