Summary
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.
Synopsis
A young married couple appears before a judge to get a divorce. The wife shows the judge some pictures of her husband with his arms around another woman, as "proof" that he was cheating on her. The husband, for his part, claims that he was just innocently helping the woman and that he was being blackmailed by the photographer who took the picture.
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