Summary
Two captains of intestinal commerce—T. Boggs Johns and George Nettleton, monarchs of the Digestive Pile Manufacturing Company—grow so weary of their incessant boardroom skirmishes that they wager the last thing either still owns outright: the dignity of the other. A midnight hand of five-card stud is dealt in a smoke-choked back office; the loser, by solemn contract drafted in poker-ink and lawyer’s spittle, must swap suits and serve as butler for one full revolution of the calendar. Boggs, whose luck curdles faster than last week’s cabbage, folds into servitude. Nettleton, swollen with triumph, drags his former equal through the servants’ entrance of a Gilded-Age mansion where gaslight drips like congealed butter. Enter Florence Cole—Boggs’s fiancée, equal parts porcelain and flint—arriving for roast duck and revelation. She finds her future husband balancing silver trays instead of balance sheets, yet the $5,000 hush-clause around every throat keeps the farce airtight. Attorney Thomas J. Vanderholt, smitten and slippery, leaks the secret; Florence, appalled by both men’s infantile games, conspires with Boggs to turn the house into a theater of domestic sabotage. A staged tête-à-tête between Boggs and Mrs. Nettleton—half flirtation, half coup de théâtre—provokes Nettleton into a punitive frenzy. He plots to bankrupt Boggs, but Florence coolly unmoor’s the wager’s legality: a poker debt, she argues, is no better than a handshake in hell. The film corkscrews toward a finale where social masks slip, fortunes wobble, and the only thing left standing is the brittle laughter of a woman who refuses to be anyone’s stake.
Synopsis
T. Boggs Johns and George Nettleton, proprietors of the Digestive Pile Manufacturing Companny agree upon a unique method to stop their quarreling: play a game of poker, the loser to act as servant to the winner for a year. If either member of the agreement reveals the circumstances of the pact, he shall pay a fine of $5,000. Boggs loses, and he must serve as butler in the Nettleton home. His sweetheart Florence Cole comes to dinner at the Nettletons' and is surprised to see Boggs acting as butler, but cannot learn what has brought about the change in his social status. Thomas J. Vanderholt, an attorney in love with Florence, lets her in on the pact and tells her that he drew up the plans. She denounces him, and she and Boggs plan revenge on Nettleton. Boggs arranges an intimate tableau with Mrs. Nettleton; this so angers Nettleton that he schemes to make Boggs the loser financially, but Florence declares that the pact, being based on a poker game, is not legal.
Review Excerpt
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Plot in a sentence: two industrial kings bet their dignity on a poker hand; the loser becomes the winner’s butler, and the winner becomes the laughing-stock of his own household.
There is a moment—roughly three reels in—when Robert Conness, as the freshly minted manservant Boggs, pours champagne for his rival with the mechanical precision of a man counting down to detonation. The camera lingers on the bottle’s trembling neck; the bubbles rise like tiny acts of rebellion. In that quivering sec..."
