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This film can be seen in conjunction with the same year's A Burglar for One
Night, raising as it does the problem of unemployment in the context of a crime
drama. In this film, Frank, with a wife and child, has no work and is desperate.
His kind-heartedness costs him the chance of a job, when he helps a blind man
across the road and is too late to take up the electrical job where the foreman
has already turned away other men looking for work. Like the protagonist of A
Burglar for One Night, Frank is driven to commit a crime - stealing from his
estranged father.
Whether this film is a conscious attempt to raise a social issue or to give a
crime drama an added dimension is open to debate. However its director, Bert
Haldane, does seem to have penchant for such social issues in films. Not only
did he also direct A Burglar for One Night, but even his romantic films have an
element of social comment: The Lieutenant's Bride (1912) sees a lieutenant
saving a sacked seamstress from the streets; Bill's Temptation (1912) deals with
alcoholism; The Test (1913) has a policeman spitefully exposing an ex-convict at
his new work place, while in As a Man Sows: or, an Angel of the Slums (1914) a
slum landlord is reformed.
Simon Baker
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Complete film (14:14)
