Summary
Department-store drudge Emily Ray—palms reeking of nickel change, dreams smoldering like starved tinder—is vacuumed into the velvet world of her imperious Aunt Carmen, a dowager who treats affections like balance sheets. Enter Oliver Browning, a quiet cartographer of the heart, dismissed as a gold-digging ghost by the old matriarch. While Emily’s cousin Rosamonde, a human weather-vane of taste, throws a salon for the firebrand Professor Syle—equal parts soapbox Socrates and gin-soaked Puck—the mansion’s parquet becomes a battleground of ideologies. Parlor Bolshevism bleeds into bootleg vodka; chandeliers quake under revolutionary laughter; the servants smuggle propriety back into the chaos like contraband. In the smoke-choked dawn, Oliver, armed only with courtesy and elbow grease, herds the Bacchantes out, sealing his right to love Emily without portfolio or pedigree. Their quiet wedding is a whispered revolution; society heiress Vera Ballymore’s later alliance with the professor turns radical chic into a marketable lecture circuit, proving that even anarchy has a price tag in the right parlor.
Synopsis
Emily Ray, who works in a department store, is taken in by her wealthy Aunt Carmen. Emily falls in love with Oliver Browning, but her aunt dismisses him as a nobody and a fortune hunter. Emily's wealthy married cousin, Rosamonde Vallant, always trying to keep up with the latest fads, gives a party in honor of Professor Syle, a distinguished radical who lectures her guests in "parlor Bolshevism," then takes them to Greenwich Village to meet his comrades. Emily attends the gathering, as does Aunt Carmen, who later invites the Bohemians to her home. There, overindulging in vodka, they become wild and disorderly. Oliver arrives just in time, and, with the servants' help, gets the guests under control. Eventually Emily marries Oliver, and society girl Vera Ballymore marries Professor Syle, launching him into a successful career as a lecturer in polite circles.
Review Excerpt
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A mansion stuffed with Fabergé trifles and moth-eaten morals
Wallace Irwin’s screenplay for Help Yourself arrives like a gin rickey spilled on a damask tablecloth—effervescent, irreverent, impossible to pretend it never happened. Director William C. deMille (yes, the less-celebrated but arguably slyer brother) lets every frame simmer in the tension between gilt cages and the animal desire to chew the bars. The film’s first miracle is that it makes a department-store counter feel claustrophobic ..."
