Summary
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.
Synopsis
Edgar and his friends get tired of eating and are not very particular as to what or when they eat. Sour pickles, ice cream, gum drops, cake, pie, apples, and a dozen other things are eaten and munched by the boys in one afternoon. Result: stomach-ache and comedy.
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