Summary
In a back-roads Eden stitched together by rag-tag circus canvas and the perfume of hair tonic, two overgrown innocents—Merta and Bud—stumble through a carnival of bruised family myths. Their father, a pint-size tyrant whose whip cracks like castanets, struts with the moral stature of Simon Legree on tiptoes; his pint-sized wife, three-foot of vinegar, watches the domestic theatre from a height that makes every scolding feel like skywriting. When Bud spies Dad canoodling with the town’s moon-white nurse, the scandal detonates a daisy-chain of farce: the nurse’s vengeful husband lures father and son into a beauty parlor that doubles as a gladiator pit, presided over by Blue—the ebony colossus who kneads machismo into taffy. While Merta and Bud play tag through striped pavilions, they spring the lions, those velvet-eyed anarchists, who sashay straight into the fountain of youth where society dames marinate in vanity like peaches in brandy. A pint-sized mascot—Picky—vaults into a filing cabinet, only for a lion to slide the drawer open with the nonchalance of a banker counting bills. The chase ricochets across cornfields and conscience, ending in a beauty-parlor dunk tank where the big cats sink like gilt idols, leaving the town bleached by laughter and the afterglow of a world briefly unshackled from proportion.
Synopsis
Merta and Bud were two great big grown up kinds, claiming as their parents, a four-foot Daddy, and a three-foot Ma. However, they do not escape spankings, etc., from their Dad, who was a near relative of Simon Legree. Buddy catches Dad making love to the nurses and then the fun begins! The nurse had a better half, like all nurses. The better half invites Dad and Bud to come to his beauty parlor to be improved upon. They go there, are given some nice gentle massages by the chief bully, Blue, the colored heavyweight champion of the town. When they get through with the treatments, they don't know whether they are on the head or feet. Like all country towns there was a circus, and while Mert and Bud are chasing each other in and out of the tents, they accidentally chase through the lion's cage and leave the door open. The lions escape and some of them find their way into the Beauty Parlor, where several damsels are indulging in the Fountain of Youth, etc. A little colored boy, the mascot of the Parlors, tries to escape the lions and hides in a filing cabinet, but Mr. Lion manages to open the drawer. Picky escapes through the transom of the door, but not before another lion has discovered him. He is chased for miles and miles by the wicked lions. He gives them the slip and is calmly eating pumpkin pie when his Dad, Blue, arrives. All ends in a happy peaceful way; the lions fall into the tank in the beauty parlor and sink to the regions below.
Review Excerpt
"
The first time I saw A Lion’s Alliance I was wedged into a folding chair at a Midwest nitrate fair, the projector clacking like a manic typewriter. By the time the Century Lions padded across the screen—each frame hand-tinted the color of bruised apricots—the audience had forgotten to breathe. This is not nostalgia talking; it is archaeological awe. Fred Hibbard’s 1915 one-reeler is a pocket-sized surrealist grenade lobbed straight into the genteel face of Edwardian comedy.
The Anatomy of a Fe..."
