Nominated for three Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor and Art Director), this silent thriller finds a gangland boss attempting to get away with murder. Chick Williams convinces Joan, a police sergeant’s daughter, that he has gone clean. They marry and Chick uses his wife as an alibi to get away with a crime. But a police officer was killed during the robbery and Chick slowly feels the heat of the law descending upon him. Roland West’s thriller presaged the golden age of the gangster movie in 1930s Hollywood. It’s a smart and pacey drama whose visual invention ranks it alongside ‘Underground’ and Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Blackmail’ as one of the better thrillers of the late 1920s.
