Love, Honor and Behave!

Inside a mahogany-paneled courtroom, a marriage disintegrates in freeze-frames: a flashbulb’s phosphorescent kiss illuminates the husband’s hand on a stranger’s waist, the wife’s eyes ignite with nitrate vengeance, and the gavel descends like the blade of a silent guillotine. Mack Sennett, ringmaster of custard pies and car-chase chaos, here swaps slapstick for scalpel, dissecting the American honeymoon with a cynic’s grin. The couple—he a breezy charmer marinated in speakeasy jazz, she a flapper whose bobbed hair trembles with indignation—parade their private melodrama before a judge whose yawns are more lethal than any verdict. Photographs, those brittle scraps of celluloid truth, become both evidence and erasure: a single overexposed frame turns gallantry into adultery, chivalry into blackmail currency. Around them swirls a carnival of secondary faces—grinning process servers, cigar-chewing photographers, matrons clutching handkerchiefs like battle standards—each one a mirror warped by suspicion. The film loops through flashback, confession, and fantasy until the courtroom itself feels like a Keystone chase frozen mid-scamper, leaving only the echo of wedding bells turned police sirens. When the final card flickers, the audience realizes the joke: the only innocent here is the camera, and even it lies.