Summary
A jazz-age flapper, all feathers and flirtation, discovers that the Charleston cannot drown out the primal wail of an abandoned infant; what begins as a lark on city asphalt—her silk-clad knees scuffed by sudden maternity—mutates into a domestic fugue of borrowed bassinets and phantom lullabies. The telephone, that serpentine oracle of miscommunication, hisses half-truths to a husband who storms home armed with rattles and rocking-horses, expecting an heir conjured from thin air. Meanwhile, the temporary foundling becomes a mirror in which the wife glimpses her own hollow glitter; when the rightful nurse reclaims the child, the apartment exhales a silence so cavernous that the couple tries to plug it with yet another random baby, only to have destiny deliver the first one back like a returned letter—now doubled, like an uncanny stutter in the film’s very DNA.
Synopsis
A young wife is too fond of the frivolities of life to care about raising babies. But one day she finds herself called upon to help a woman in the street who is taken suddenly ill and is obliged to hand over her baby to strangers. The young woman takes the baby home and cares for it. The old trick of the husband misunderstanding a telephone message, and rushing home with an armful of toys for an anticipated heir, is worked in. The arrival of a nurse on the scene to claim the child leaves a vacuum in the home of the young couple, and the wife's hysteria causes the husband to hunt another baby. He arrives at home with it at the same time that the other child, whose mother is unable to care for it, is returned, causing amusing complications.
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