A man falsely
imprisoned becomes a free man in harness by dint of an escape for vengeance not
quite achieved.
A highly complex
proposition filmed as simply as possible, with the Chaney magic also
streamlined.
The twisted cripple
disguise is just a scrunching of the legs to deceive the police in Chinatown,
lawyer Webster gives it up when he returns to prison.
The most of
Cummings’ film expresses in various ways Bell’s great invention of the
telephone, which Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times calls the
foundation of “the wrong-number industry”, if you can believe it, for it is in
every way the miracle of articulate speech on intimate errands such as a
ten-mile walk might have accomplished in two hours and does at the start of the
film, it’s the voice that speaks out of silence in a deaf child, the vibrations
that reach the heart of a deaf young woman, the comical desperation of Bell and
Watson, the exasperation of their elders, oh what is it not, the invention of
anything?
Bell then goes to
court, defending his patent against infringement by a hoodwinked
“forty-million-dollar concern, the Western Union,” and that is when Cummings
has his say, and so does Alexander Graham Bell.