Summary
Under a sun-cracked firmament that feels more like a fever dream than any map-point in the American West, Parched City once imagined itself civilized—until Susie, a revolver-slinging she-sheriff who dresses like Eddie Polo’s celluloid ghost, strides in to police the anarchy of libation and dynamite. Her gaze skews at impossible angles; bullets ricochet like homing boomerangs, shearing through crates of mustard gas and T.N.T. with the casual grace of a gallery curator shredding priceless canvases. Her brother, a moonshine-mottled outlaw, kneads himself into her palms like warm clay, yet conspires behind her back with a gang that treats prohibition as mere background noise. The town’s favorite parlor entertainment—collecting apocalyptic care packages at the express office—ends when Susie perforates every parcel, turning glassware futures into glittering shrapnel. From one ruptured box springs a lion, mane aflame with studio klieg lights, whose carnivorous waltz evaporates the last droplets of liquor and reason. By the time the end credits ripple, Parched City is less reformed than transfigured into a surrealist fresco where law, lawlessness, and lion appetites blur into a single, thirstless horizon.
Synopsis
The town of Parched City was being reformed. One of the evidences was a she-sheriff named Susie. But Susie had seen Eddie Polo in the pictures and had adopted his pattern of shirt and his inexhaustible revolvers. By looking cross-eyed she could shoot a man standing at right or left angles with the accuracy of a boomerang thrower. Susie's brother was a bold bad man, although in Susie's hands he was like putty. His gang was always falling afoul of the liquor laws. The greatest indoor sport in Parched City was going to the express office and calling for shipments of dynamite, T.N.T. and Mustard Gas, but finally Susie got wise to this game and shot her revolver through every package as it went by the desk. As a glassware exhibit it wasn't worth taking away. Al Cohol called for his shipment. Susie busted the look with a well-placed shot and out jumped a ferocious lion. When the lion got through with the town it was still more parched and not a drop to wet its whistles.
Review Excerpt
"
If you blink, you’ll miss the precise moment when the silent American West becomes a dadaist carnival; but Susie—sheriff, fashion plagiarist, and boomerang-ballistics virtuoso—makes sure your eyelids stay pried open with matchsticks of disbelief.
Frisky Lions and Wicked Husbands is not so much a narrative as a stack of nitrate postcards soaked in moonshine, then ignited by a lion’s roar. Shot on the cheap in 1925 yet bursting with visual ideas that would make Buñuel’s hornet-head spin, the fi..."
