Summary
Potter’s Field yawns open like a mouth of forgotten earth, ready to swallow the nameless cadaver of an aging mother whose only kin, a nickel-plated grifter named Jimmy Raft, slouches back into town on the last freight car, pockets as empty as the chapel bell that refuses to toll. In the tenement dusk he learns that the woman who once sang him lullabies over a cracked harmonium is already boxed in pine, scheduled for the pauper’s trench at dawn. Shame detonates; Jimmy vows to conjure up the price of a decent coffin before sunrise, and so he slips into the neon cincture of the city where jewelry stores glitter like cathedrals of temptation. Across the river, Officer Mike O’Farrell—badge burnished, morals fraying—patrols a beat that smells of rain-soaked coal and marital acrimony; his wife, suffocated by the sour mash of routine, abandons their cooing infant amid perfumed aisles of a department store, a careless Moses in a mahogany cradle of sale tags. Closing clerks hand the baffled patriarch his own bloodline wrapped in a receiving blanket; he fails to recognize the coral-flecked eyes that mirror his. Meanwhile Jimmy’s heist unspools: a smash-and-grab on a taxi-cab jewellery courier, the getaway shimmying through wet asphalt arteries until fate’s traffic light blares red. The two trajectories collide—patrol car fender crumples into thief’s escape vehicle—metal shrieks, petrol geysers, flames blossom like obscene peonies. From the inferno Jimmy emerges, coat singed, cradling the alien infant whose giggle pierces the noir night like a dropped crystal glass. Only when the smoke clears and the child’s toy badge—tin star, gift from a mother too harried to notice—glints in the gutter does the policeman recognize the cosmic joke: the outlaw has rescued the only legacy he has left. Grief transmutes; the lawman’s handcuffs hover, hesitate, then close around Jimmy’s wrists not as shackles but as a shared anchor to the living. Dawn finds them blood-brothers in guilt, a funeral finally afforded, a mother lowered into hallowed ground while an orphaned child—now doubly claimed—sleeps against a reformed chest that once beat only for larceny.
Synopsis
A crook returns home to find his mother dead and about to be buried in Potters Field. This prompts him to go out upon a "job" so that he may secure money to give his mother a funeral. In the meantime the policeman's wife has left their baby in a department store and the child was handed over to the cop at the closing hour. The policeman did not recognize his own baby, and while on the way to the station, he ran into the robbery. The crook, however, jumped into the policeman's taxi and found the baby on the seat. A chase takes place that ends in a smash-up. The crook saves the baby from the flames of the burning car, and only later does the policeman discover that it was his own child.
Review Excerpt
"The first time you see Jimmy Raft’s silhouette—shoulders hunched like a question mark against the sodium haze of the rail yard—you realize this film has no intention of comforting you. Bertram Bracken, that poet of shadows, opens on a funeral that hasn’t happened yet: a plain deal coffin balanced on two trestles in a candle-less room, the dead woman’s feet protruding like accusations. The camera lingers until the silence itself seems to decay. It is 1921, and American cinema is still learning..."
