Film Forum

U.S., 1927
Written and Directed by Allan Dwan
Starring George O’Brien, Virginia Valli, J. Farrell MacDonald
Approx. 90 min. 4K restoration.

One of the last, and certainly among the best, of the major features shot at Fox’s New York studios at 55th Street and Tenth Avenue, Allan Dwan’s late silent was adapted from a bestselling novel by Felix Riesenberg. After losing his parents in an East River barge accident, young John Breen is raised by a Jewish family on the Lower East Side, growing up to become a celebrated prizefighter. Though he becomes engaged to the ward of a Park Avenue millionaire, his true love remains his childhood sweetheart, Beka Lipvitch. A true New York City epic, driven by Dwan’s streamlined montage and a generous use of locations from the Bowery to Washington Heights.

Presented with support from The Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“Street thugs, scrappy immigrants, uptown swells, and a keen Irish bargeman who wants a better life for himself. Allan Dwan’s love letter to New York makes stops at the city’s storied spots, packing in all the color and verve of the place that by the ’20s had already burnished its own mythology as somewhere anyone with a lot of grit and a bit of luck could rise from its bustling slums to its spacious drawing rooms.”
– San Francisco Silent Film Festival

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