Henpecked and Pecked Hens

A ramshackle Nebraska farmstead, all peeled paint and chicken-wire, becomes the stage for a marital danse macabre: Alfred Hewston’s weather-beaten egg farmer, Elmer, wakes each dawn to a cacophony of clucking hens and a wife whose tongue cuts sharper than any hatchet. Over twenty-four delirious hours the film tracks his attempt to smuggle a single, perfect speckled egg to the county fair—an egg he has secretly cradled like a Fabergé relic—while dodging the cyclonic scorn of his spouse, the iron-eyed Hattie, and the predatory gaze of a traveling buyer who smells profit in Elmer’s obsession. The plot spirals into barnyard surrealism: chickens stage a coup, a thunderstorm turns the coop into a strobe-lit opera house, and Elmer, clad in a nightshirt and galoshes, delivers a mute soliloquy to the moonlit flock that is half-King Lear, half-barnyard slapstick. By the time the rooster crows again, the egg has been swapped, cracked, devoured, and finally resurrected in a cracked porcelain dish, leaving Elmer both henpecked and vindicated, a rural Sisyphus clutching shell fragments that glint like stained glass at dawn.