Summary
Dawn breaks over a genteel apartment block where Phil—manicured flaneur, terpsichorean pedagogue, and casual sybarite—conducts a choreography of coffee, cold plunge, and canine valet-service orchestrated by Brownie, the most debonair of collies. Across the parquet divide, a seamstress and her nubile daughter exist in corseted propriety until the girl’s pulse syncopates with Phil’s two-step; clandestine elopement is plotted, foiled, and transmogrified into a whirlwind of swapped valises. One grip brims with heirloom jewels filched by a freshly sprung convict; the other holds nothing racier than a starched collar. Doors slam, corridors zigzag, and identities blur as the matriarch, the lovers, the thief, and a squad of bumbling gendarmes ricochet through a Rube-Goldberg farce that vaults from boudoir to rooftop gutters. When the final trunk is claimed and the larcenous stowaway dangles from a cornice in cuffs, dawn’s polite veneer re-sets: mothers forgive, professors procure brides, and Brownie wags the curtain closed on a world where desire, larceny, and slapstick pirouette in perfect three-quarter time.
Synopsis
The beginning of a perfect day was for Phil to make his own breakfast, take his daily plunge, and be waited on by his valet, who happens to be Brownie the dog. Outside of being a gentleman, Phil was also a dancing professor and taught pretty young ladies how to twinkle their toes. Across the hall from him lived a modiste and her daughter. The daughter was pretty and that's where the story becomes interesting. A pretty girl, a next door neighbor and strict mother all go to make a very deliciously naughty situation. They are about to elope when mother returns and finds her daughter leaving home. She scolds her, and in the rush to get her into her apartment, leaves her grip outside in the hall. Phil grabs his grip and runs back into his room. In the meantime an ex-jail bird has managed to get away with a grip full of jewels; However, the police are right on his heels and chase him into the same house where Phil and the girl live. He rushes up into the hall where he sees the other grip, changes the grips and when the officer gets up to him and searches the grip, all he finds is a collar. The mother realizes the loss of her daughter's grip, goes out into the hall and takes the grip. A general mix-up of grips follows wherein some very funny incidents occur. After a very daring roof chase, the thief is caught and thrown back into prison. Mother forgives the professor and the finis fade out leaves every one in a happy contented mood.
Review Excerpt
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A champagne-cork of a film, All for the Dough Bag detonates the staid drawing-room comedy and scatters its bones across stairwells, fire escapes, and moonlit parapets.
There is a moment—roughly midway—when the camera, drunk on spatial lunacy, tilts up from the claustrophobic hallway to the night sky: a cut that liberates both breath and plausibility. In that vertiginous splice, J.A. Howe’s screenplay asserts its thesis: desire is a suitcase you can’t label, authority is a hinge that squeaks o..."
