Summary
A foundling, Daniel, is plucked from the gutter by a pawnbroker whose shop glimmers like a tarnished halo on the Lower East Side; the boy’s moral compass spins wildly under the magnetism of delinquent street-philosophers until a nocturnal hallucination—half-phantom, half-prophecy—paints him a future of iron bars and ash, jolting him back toward grace. Parallel to this odyssey, a Midas of Wall Street, Charles Redding, discovers that love can be short-sold when his fiancée absconds with a rival; wealth becomes worthless currency in a heart that now trades only in despair, and he drifts through speakeasies and fog like a king in rags. Thirteen bachelors at a stag dinner pull him from the brink; their host, it emerges, is the very son of the woman who fled, and the arithmetic of coincidence suddenly balances the ledger of years. In the chandeliered hush of that dining room, past and present clasp hands, and the city’s lights—once harsh, now tender—re-illuminate two lives that had forgotten how to glow.
Synopsis
Two distinct stories of New York life are told in this film. In the first, Daniel, a foundling, is given a home by Robert Reid, an East Side pawnbroker. He is a good boy but is led astray by evil companions until a dream shocks him into the realization of what his life may become; Daniel then resolves to "go straight." In the second episode, wealthy Wall Street financier Charles Redding plunges into despair and dereliction after he learns of his fiancée's elopement with another man. Sometime later, a bachelor party of 13 brings him in from the street to alter their number. When the guests urge Redding to tell his life story, it is revealed that the host is the son of Redding's former fiancée. She and Redding are then reunited.
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