Summary
Two adjacent apartment doors slam open at dawn, each disgorging a woman in campaign tweed who instantly snarls at her own reflection in the hallway mirror before snarling at the other’s. Their bell-pulls become battering rams, their corsets breastplates, their teacats war drums; every stair-creak is an electoral gong, every milk bottle a ballot box rigged with dynamite. Alice Howell’s Officer Brannigan—freckled, fire-haired, built like a windmill—has sworn to scrub the city’s sin with a toothbrush of probity. Rose Burkhardt’s Captain Voss—sable-bobbed, velvet-voiced, eyes like switchblades—promises the same streets a brass-band carnival of graft. Between them lies nothing thicker than a wall of peeling cabbage-rose wallpaper, yet that membrane splits the tenement into hostile principalities. By day they kiss babies, raid speakeasies, and trade bribes like baseball cards; by night they reroute each other’s mail to Timbuktu, salt the sugar, and swap campaign buttons with lewd limericks etched on the reverse. A municipal debate is scheduled inside a boxing ring; the referee is a goat. The mayor, a trembling codger who communicates only via kazoo, has promised the victor a badge the size of a manhole cover and a pension in beer. Richard Smith’s hapless beat cop, torn between libidos and loyalties, becomes the contested territory: each candidate stages increasingly baroque seductions—one with ukulele serenades on the fire escape, the other with bathtub gin and a Victrola playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” at 78 rpm. Tommy Flynn’s newsboy narrates the saga in rhyming headlines tossed from rooftops like confetti grenades. When the ballots are finally tallied on a laundry line, the winner is announced by carrier pigeon; the loser, catapulted into a vat of potato salad, immediately demands a recount with forks. The city, dizzy with confetti and scandal, forgets to notice that crime has evaporated—not through policy, but because every pickpocket, pimp, and politico has enlisted as campaign staff. The film ends with both women sharing the same pair of handcuffs, swinging from a lamppost, laughing like maniacs while the goat eats the official results.
Synopsis
Two female candidates for Chief of Police live across the hall from each other, and their political rivalry follows them home, leading to plenty of hi-jinks.
