Beggars of Life

A young tramp goes into a house to ask for food. A man is sitting dead at the table and a girl is opposite him: she has shot her stepfather. The two run together. She dresses as a boy and they jump freight trains. On the road they fall in with a band of tramps, whose leader Oklahoma Red works out who she is and starts thinking about the reward. The subject is not the escape but whether the poor will give each other up. The men on the train know about the reward and have to decide; the film neither romanticises nor demonises them. The form was shot on the road. William A. Wellman used real freight trains and real track; the scenes on top of the cars were filmed on moving trains with limited use of doubles. Louise Brooks is at the centre. Shortly after this film she left America for Germany and made the best-known work of her career there; the male disguise and hard playing here come immediately before that departure. It was shot silent and the studio later prepared a version with sound added; the passage in which Wallace Beery sings belongs to that version. Richard Arlen plays the young tramp. Who it is for: viewers who like silent cinema and early examples of the road film. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a clean image; the surviving prints are worn and some passages are missing.