Summary
A man shoulders the sins of a corpse, trades five years of daylight for a tomb-quiet cell, and emerges into a world that has already buried him. Every familiar face—from the woman whose gaze once held galaxies to the colleagues who once toasted his sentences—now flinches at the specter of his disgrace. Penniless, paperless, and perpetually shadowed by the penitentiary’s chalk-dust pallor, David Aldrich drifts through a metropolis that greets ex-convicts with bolted doors and nickel-and-dime charity. Yet the narrative refuses to slump into miserabilism; instead it threads a trembling needle between Dickensian ordeal and American self-reinvention. Aldrich scavenges odd jobs in printers’ alleys, sleeps in the iron skeleton of an unfinished bridge, and ghostwrites love-letters for illiterate stevedores while hoarding contraband adjectives for his own clandestine manuscript. When a chance encounter with a crusading editor ignites a slow-burn redemption arc, the film pivots from soot-streaked naturalism into incandescent parable: the stolen name restored, the book that was once confiscated as evidence reborn as a bestseller, the woman who relinquished trust now reading his prose aloud by candlelight, her voice shaking like a tuning fork against the dark.
Synopsis
David Aldrich takes upon his own shoulders the thefts of a dead friend and is sent to prison for misappropriation of funds. At the end of a five year sentence he comes out of jail to start life anew. Even the woman who loved him thinks him guilty, and he is reduced to dire want before he finds the turn in the path that leads upward. In the end he wins back his fair name and literary fame as well, but only after a series of engrossing happenings that threaten to drive him still deeper Into the underworld.
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