A Bashful Bigamist

A suburban matrimonial chessboard, pastel picket fences concealing polyhedral deceit: one man, two marriage licenses, zero exit strategy. Eddie Barry’s restless every-husband shuttles between twin domestic spheres—each wife serenely oblivious, each living-room altar draped in lace and lies. Helen Gilmore’s matron orchestrates domestic baroque rituals (candlelit pot roast, apologetic lingerie) to anchor her wandering stallion. Meanwhile, across town, Mary Lewis’s ingenue stitches gingham curtains, humming lullabies to a future already mortgaged. The film’s comic engine is spatial vertigo: identical staircases, mirrored coat racks, duplicate terriers answering to the same whistle. Every slamming door ricochets like a bullet through both households; every misplaced monogrammed handkerchief threatens detonation. Into this high-stakes farce waddles Billy Bletcher’s pint-sized private-eye—part bloodhound, part cupid—scribbling alibis on gum wrappers, mistaking bedrooms for crime scenes. The wives, tipped off by overlapping grocery receipts, converge in a moonlit park: parasols twirl like sabers, accusations fly like confetti, yet sisterhood blooms amid shared indignation. Together they draft a counter-contract: a synchronized choreography of headaches, curfews, and budgetary novenas designed to imprison their bigamist in a velvet cage of his own making. The climax is a three-door tango—kitchen to parlour to nursery—where slammed portals echo like cymbals in a Bizet opera, culminating in one exhausted male discovering both spouses at the same church bazaar, each clutching identical embroidery hoops. No fists, no firearms—only the silent, surgical coup of domestic omnipotence. Fade-out on the wives sipping cocoa, the sheepish husband folding linens under their gaze, a new triumvirate etched in the flicker of nickelodeon light.