"This curiosity was twenty-five-year-old Frank Capra's first venture into film. Made in San Francisco at the Montague Studios, and played entirely by non-actors from the waterfront, it is a curious parallel to von Sternberg's first film Salvation Hunters, although unlike the Sternberg film it doesn't act as a blueprint for anything to come in Capra's later career. Squalid and grim without any hint of comedy, it is based on a Rudyard Kipling poem-which Capra wasn't above changing somewhat to fit his instinctive sense of story construction!" William K. Everson