Edgar's Feast Day

A sun-bleached Midwestern afternoon liquefies into a carnival of jaws as Edgar—rag-tag prince of the back-lot kingdom—gathers his ragged court of buzz-cut pagans to wage war on every pantry between the railroad tracks and the river. Pickle jars sweat like guilty secrets, ice-cream bricks melt faster than childhood promises, and gumdrops roll like technicolor hail across splintered porch boards while the camera, half-drunk on its own whip-pans, ogles this orgiastic riot of sugar, salt, and vinegar. Tarkington’s scenario, compressed to a single reel, becomes a pocket-sized epic of ingestion: a boy’s open mouth replaces the hero’s sword, each bite a conquest, each swallow a diminuendo of self-control until bellies distend into comic globes and the sky itself seems to burp. The final tableau—groaning children strewn like toppled statuary beneath a pear tree—turns slapstick into still-life, a gooey pièta of nausea that winks at the audience: here, excess is both the joke and the moral, the pie in the sky and the stomach-ache on the ground.