Summary
A soot-smudged Everyman, fresh from the penitentiary’s iron womb, drifts into a whistle-stop town whose factory stacks claw at a pewter sky; there, amid the percussion of typewriter hammers, he locks eyes with a prim stenographer whose silhouette smells of ink and lilac. Matrimony follows like a fever—railway tickets to a neon-lit Babylon where hope is sold by the watt. Their wedding night, instead of champagne sighs, is splintered by a police siren: the plant has been ransacked, the ex-con’s fingerprints glow accusingly under cobalt light. Rejected by time-clocks and time-keepers, he slinks back to the asphalt underworld, while his bride, now corseted in silk, transcribes the whims of a gilded dowager and fends off the prowling appetites of an heir who mistakes her band of gold for tinsel. Into their tenement climbs a wounded night-bird—one of the actual thieves—bleeding out on the iron lattice of a fire escape; with his last breath he scrawls absolution in mid-air, the city’s sodium glow baptizing the husband’s name back into innocence.
Synopsis
Ex-convict Donald Grant obtains a job in a small-town factory, where he meets stenographer Helen Wilburton. They are soon married and move to the city, but on the first night of their honeymoon, the factory is burglarized and Donald is suspected. Desperate for work, Donald returns to his former gang, while Helen becomes the secretary to a wealthy matron. Helen also attracts the attention of her employer's son, who is rudely surprised when he discovers that she is married. Later, one of the robbers arrives at the couple's apartment; a battle ensues on the fire escape, after which the dying criminal exonerates Donald.
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