Summary
A shell-shocked, pint-sized ex-doughboy—lauded only for fanning a swooning second lieutenant—trudges home to find his welcome mat replaced by a Ruritanian circus of counterfeit counts, saber-rattling Prussian caricatures, and a betrothal contract written in disappearing ink. What begins as a modest victory parade metastasizes into a slapstick opera of forced nuptials, vertiginous ivy assaults on palace parapets, and a gender-bending masquerade whose lace-trimmed punchlines detonate just inside the bounds of 1922 propriety. Bobby Vernon, all five-foot-two of elastic incredulity, ricochets between drawing-room conspiracies and rooftop swordplay, brandishing a rapier that seems borrowed from a grander picture while wearing the same tunic <a href="/movies/nosferatu">Nosferatu</a> might have rejected for excess cobwebs. In the flicker of two reels, kingdoms totter, corsets inflate, and every balustrade sprouts insurgent foliage as though the ivy itself had enlisted.
Synopsis
Returning from war something less than a hero ("he saved a second lieutenant from fainting"), our humble protagonist Bobby Vernon nonetheless gets sucked into some very farcical post-combat politics involving Mittle-European royalty, Teutonic ruffians, forced marriage, much sword-fighting and mass ivy-climbing. Not to mention brief cross-dressing "gay" humor. This two-reeler spoof featuring the petit five-foot-two-inch former vaudevillian Vernon doubtless used costumes and sets from more expensive actual Ruritanian romances of the day.
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