A One Cylinder Love Riot

A dust-caked jalopy backfires across a nameless Depression town, its single piston wheezing like a broken accordion; inside, Lillian Biron’s wide-eyed manicurist clutches a mascara wand as if it were Excalibur, fleeing a shotgun wedding to Bud Jamison’s walrus-mustached mechanic, whose greasy heart ticks louder than the engine he adores. Connie Henley’s flapper pickpocket, all spit-curled mischief, vaults into the back seat mid-chase, palming engagement rings and carburetors with equal nonchalance, while Billy Engle’s pint-sized traffic cop, pant-legs swimming in regulation boots, pursues on a bicycle whose chain keeps slipping into surreal punchlines. Between flat tires and flirtations, the quartet ricochet from a moonlit carnival—where the Ferris wheel becomes a courtroom of public opinion—to a riverbank baptism that turns into a custard-pie Last Supper, until the car itself expires in a sigh of steam that morphs into a marriage altar. Tom Buckingham’s script treats every piston stroke as a heartbeat, every gag as epiphany: the film is a pocket-sized odyssey in which courtship is a jalopy, commitment is a flat tire, and love, finally, is the shared grease under every fingernail.