Summary
Across six kinetic bursts of celluloid, each barely twenty minutes yet detonating like firecrackers in a cathedral, The Leather Pushers tracks Reginald Denny’s grinning drifter—equal parts poet pugilist and street-corner ironist—who stumbles from freight-car dusk into the carnival of prizefighting with nothing but a cracked leather jacket and a mouth that won’t quit. Episode one, Let’s Go, drops him at the edge of a Kansas rail yard where bookmaker-cum-barnstormer Charles Ascot slaps a pair of borrowed gloves on him; the camera, drunk on dust and sun flare, watches Denny’s first swing arc like a comet past Sam McVey’s granite jaw, inaugurating a cycle of scams, side-bets, and sentiment. Payment Through the Nose bleeds monochrome chiaroscuro as loan-shark silhouettes demand nostril-to-nostril intimidation, yet Witwer’s pen turns the bruise into burlesque—Fay Tincher’s cigarette-girl vamp counts punches like pearls on a broken necklace. By The Taming of the Shrewd Norma Shearer appears, eyes sharp enough to slice the title card, trading barbed quips with Denny in a hotel corridor that folds space between <a href='/movies/marriage'>Marriage</a>’s marital claustrophobia and the wide-open swagger of <a href='/movies/high-pockets'>High Pockets</a>. Final reel, Whipsawed, stages a dockside bout inside a net of steamer ropes: each punch lands with the wet slap of bait fish, the victor crowned by moonlight rather than purse, the saga dissolving back into steam-whistle night as if the whole escapade were merely the projection of a hobo’s flask-spun hallucination.
Synopsis
A series of six two-reel episodes, each individually titled: #1: Let's Go (1922); #2: Round Two (1922); #3: Payment Through the Nose (1922); #4: A Fool and His Honey (1922); #5: The Taming of the Shrewd (1922); #6: Whipsawed.
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