The Great Nickel Robbery

A nickelodeon cosmos unfurls inside a rattling streetcar: brass rails gleam like gallows, overhead cables hum requiems for every un-rung fare. Chester—motorman, petty monarch of this rolling iron box—nurtures a tin-soldier’s bank that swells with each deliberate silence of his cash register. Dorothy Lee’s ticket-taker pirouettes through the aisle, her eyes semaphore lamps warning of audits, yet she pirouettes again into complicity. Between clangs of the bell the film measures morality by five-cent increments, turning petty larceny into a toy-theater revolt against industrial nickel-and-diming. The trolley itself becomes a metronome of class: outside, Depression-shadowed citizens chase the vehicle like specters of debt; inside, Conklin’s conductor harvests their coins with the serene impunity of a pickpocket-saint. When the company’s cigar-chomping inspector boards, the narrative tightens like a noose made of paper transfers, culminating in a Keystone-tinged chase whose stakes feel apocalyptically trivial. Yet in that triviality the picture locates the American soul: a nation built on skimming, on nickel surcharges, on the beautiful fiction that if you keep the register quiet you might outrun the century.