Summary
A speck-on-the-map whistle-stop, all dust and porch gossip, suddenly vibrates when Lillian—Joe’s collegiate, citified daughter—returns, trailing big-city ozone and small-town dreams of courtship. Aunt Emily, spinster incarnate, haunted by the tick-tock of her own unclaimed youth, secretly dispatches a studio portrait of her radiant niece to a lonely-hearts bureau, passing the likeness off as herself. Enter Charles, a peripatetic Ford-owner guided by a panting bloodhound and a perfumed letter, convinced he is speeding toward destiny’s bride. At the inn’s creaking threshold he meets a deliberately drab Lillian—forced into sack-cloth frippery by a petulant aunt—and yet the spark arcs: love at first mortifying sight. Serendipity gushes faster than rhetoric when a gusher of crude erupts behind the inn, turning Joe into an overnight petroleum monarch; Charles’s pulse quickens in perfect synchrony with the oil-pressure gauge. The lovers conspire to elope beneath constellations and carbide headlamps, but Aunt Emily, eavesdropping through keyholes, commandeers the assignation, veiling herself like Persephone in tulle. At the parsonage, vows approach escape velocity until Lillian and her petroleum-soaked patriarch storm the chancel, yank back the veil, and swap brides mid-sentence—leaving Aunt Emily jilted at the altar of her own contrivance, clutching a fossilized bouquet of what-ifs.
Synopsis
Joe's daughter was coming home from college and the town was excited because Lillian was a "peach." Joe ran the village inn assisted by Aunt Emily, who was so darn anxious to get married that she had sent her niece's photograph to a matrimonial agency, claiming the likeness as her own, in her effort to land a "man." Charles is riding along the road in a Ford closely watched by Brownie, the sheriff's dog. He strikes Joe's inn as a reception is being held for Lillian and recognizes her immediately as the girl in the photo whom he had come to marry at the instance of the agency. Lillian was dressed in an ugly costume, because Aunt was angry and had forced it upon her, but Charles falls in love with her anyway. As luck would have it, the family get rich through discovery of oil in the back yard, and this doubles Charles' ardor, so that he and Lillian plan to elope. But the plan is overheard by Aunty, who works it so that she takes Lillian's place. She is heavily veiled and the unsuspecting Charles whisks her off to a minster's house. Just as the binding words are being pronounced, Lillian and Dad who had discovered the plot, pounce upon the pair and poor Aunty is left on the "shelf" because an exchange of brides is immediately instituted.
Review Excerpt
"
The first surprise of An Oil-Can Romeo is how briskly its 23-minute reel inhales the oxygen of myth. One moment the screen is a sepia postcard of nowhere—clapboard façades, a mongrel dozing in wheel-ruts—the next it combusts into a carnival of mistaken identity, liquid gold, and veiled switcheroos that would make even the Dawn of Love blush. Produced on a shoestring by the eccentric Bray-Hurd unit and dumped into neighborhood theaters in March 1923, the short has languished in the attics of ci..."
