A Good Scout

Domestic ennui curdles into slapstick anarchy when a door-to-door bibliopole—Jimmie Adams, all elbows and dental enamel—invades the breakfast nook of a marriage already souring under the wife’s lethal cuisine. A poodle fails as palace guard; a bulldog succeeds, hurtling the agent into a pastoral labyrinth of straw stacks where two Keystone-flatfooted patrolmen join the hunt. The first reel is pure kinesthetic frenzy—clouds of chaff, sun-dappled terror, zero punch lines. A narrative ellipsis later we surface at a scout camp whose moral compass is as lost as its neckerchiefs, and the whole ragtag caravan sinks into a swamp that swallows both dignity and plot. Somewhere between the bubbling mud and the mosquito drone, the film forgets to be funny yet keeps sprinting, like a gag reflex with no joke to trigger it.