evident that Tom himself has a bad streak that has little to do with his milieu. After all, his brother is a product of the same world and turns out different. Tom and his friend Matt work by delivering buckets of beer to neighborhood saloons, but they fall under the sway of the Fagin-like Putty Nose and become petty thieves first, later armed robbers. They are thus well on their way to a life of crime from the time their youth, and they grow up in this world and continue, graduating to more vicious and dangerous crimes as they do so. The slums in which they live offer considerable motivation for young men like this to do whatever they have to in order to get out and make it in the wider world, and always there is the American Dream as a promise of what should be, contrasted with the way they actually have to live.
The two young men do grow up and become big-time gangsters. By this time, Prohibition is the law of the land, and they become rumrunners. They are also involved in the bootleg wars where different gangs fought over turf and for the business in a given area. It is these wars that lead to Tom's downfall, for his friend Matt is killed, sending Tom on a rampage for revenge until he himself is shot and sent to the hospital. While he is in the hospital his older brother, Mike, a World War I veteran and night-school student seeking to better himself and achieve the American Dream in the accepted way, tries to talk Tom into giving up the gangster life. Later, Mike gets a call saying Tom is coming home. Their mother prepares for the return of her son, and she puts his favorite record on the Victrola. When Mike answers a knock at the door, his brother's bullet-riddled corpse is leaning against the front door, wrapped like a mummy. This horrific scene ends the film as the corpse falls forward into the home.
The character of Tom Powers comes from a tough background, but the film does not blame his environment but h...