Summary
A nameless newcomer, fresh off the boat, stumbles through the bureaucratic labyrinth of Ellis-Island-on-acid, a quarantine station whose corridors exhale chlorine and xenophobia in equal measure. Papers stamped, body prodded, he believes release is a mere formality—until every exit mutates into a revolving hatchback to the same disinfectant limbo. Each ‘liberation’ launches him like a slapstick comet: across rooftops, into hay carts, through windows, down laundry chutes, always boomeranging back to the gatekeepers who yawn, “Next.” While he ricochets, two contract killers—one blade, one bomb—shadow the farce, mistaking his bewildered skull for a political bull’s-eye. Their schemes detonate in cascading misfires: a stiletto finds a loaf of bread, nitroglycerin obliterates a privy, nothing scratches the immigrant’s oblivious hide. Between pratfalls he collides with a white-clad nurse whose smile could sterilize surgical steel; their courtship is a silent waltz of thermometer swaps, ether huffs, and gurney-wheel pirouettes. By the time the final reel shudders, the greenhorn has not so much escaped as metabolized the prison into muscle memory; freedom is simply the next waiting room, love a pulse that beeps in sync with the hospital monitor.
Synopsis
A greenhorn immigrant arrives and enters quarantine. Getting in is easy, but getting out is another thing. He makes several flying exits, but returns with equal velocity. While he is going from one department to another, like a regular immigrant, there are two assassins on his trail. They attempt to stab him, bomb him and in other ways to do away with him, but he outwits them with his lack of wits and manages, though not quite plausibly, to get into a closeup with a sweet little nurse who is kept busy around the place.
Review Excerpt
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Laughter echoing through disinfected hallways—The Greenhorn weaponizes slapstick to autopsy the immigrant experience, stitching pratfall scars onto the Statue of Liberty’s hem.
Charles Reisner’s one-reel fever dream, shot in the ghost-light between 1918’s Spanish-flu hysteria and 1921’s Emergency Quota Act, feels like a bureaucratic purgatorio that Chaplin never dared enter. Lloyd Hamilton—rubber-legged, moon-faced, a walking ellipsis—incarnates every passport photo that blinks back suspicion. ..."
