Summary
In a sun-dappled America still humming with post-war jazz yet already flirting with the first whispers of flapper rebellion, David Harrington—sartorially precise, morally Victorian—constructs a dollhouse bungalow as a nuptial cage for Betty Graves, a platinum-haired sylph who treats tradition like yesterday’s corset. Their courtship implodes inside that pastel prison: she mocks its picket-fence banality; he recoils from her cosmopolitan disdain. Love, once a gilded promise, fractures into shards of gendered ideology. Enter Sybil—equal parts Hedda Gabler and Keystone acrobat—storming out of her own marriage over a hat, dragging three sugar-crazed offspring into David’s suddenly seismic living room. Measles, taffy fevers, and a quarantine charade concocted with Betty’s bemused physician father trap the fractured lovers under one feverish roof while Herbert, Sybil’s estranged spouse, crashes the chaos. What begins as a domestic farce mutates into a pastel-and-poison meditation on whether affection can survive the collision between walnut-paneled nostalgia and chrome-plated modernity. By the time the front door slams shut, alliances have been scrambled, pieties bruised, and David’s old-fashioned heart rebooted into a fragile, egalitarian hope.
Synopsis
David Harrington plans to marry Betty Graves. He is an old-fashioned boy, believing in marriage, having children, and living a suburban life. Betty is more ultra-modern, and independent. When Betty gets a tour of the bungalow that David has built for them, she says it's cute but she would hate to have to live in it. The two break up and Betty goes back to a former sweetheart. Sybil, the wife of David's friend Herbert, has just has a row with her husband because he wouldn't buy her a new hat. So she takes their three children and hides in David's home, hoping to throw a scare into her husband. Now David tries to take care of the kids, hoping to forget his own troubles. Herbert phones David that he is coming over, but David tells his friend he has the measles. Meanwhile, Sybil's kids have gotten sick from eating too much taffy. So David calls Betty's father, who is a doctor. Betty comes over with her father, and David cooks up a scheme with the doctor to quarantine the house so that Betty will have to stay and help him take care of the children. Herbert arrives and chaos ensues when he discovers his wife and kids are there. Eventually, things get straightened out and David regains Betty's love.
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