Matri-Money

Bud Fisher’s sole cinematic chimera, Matri-Money, disinters the cadaver of Jazz-Age courtship and re-animates it with the galvanic twitch of stock-ticker tape. A trust-fund sylph, dimpled in pearls yet hollow in the eyes, is auctioned by her steel-magnate aunt to the highest bidder in a Manhattan ballroom masquerading as a cathedral. Enter a penurious cartoonist whose pen once inked flappers and bootleggers—now reduced to sketching the bride-to-be on the backs of overdue bills. Their nuptial contract, inked in haste and sealed with a counterfeit diamond, metastasizes into a carnivalesque odyssey: from a honeymoon train derailed by speculators playing poker with wedding presents, to a backwoods cabin where the dowry is mysteriously swapped for a suitcase of worthless mining deeds, to a final showdown in a shuttered bank whose vault yawns like a metallic mouth hungry for human illusions. Along the way, dowager bankers in walrus moustaches moralize over ledgers, chorus girls kick like disjointed marionettes, and the cartoonist’s ink-stained fingers keep redrawing the heroine’s silhouette until she slips the page and becomes flesh—yet the flesh now bears price-tag scars. The film ends not with a kiss but with the bride lighting her marriage certificate on fire to warm her hands while the groom sells his last cartoon to the highest bidder: a sketch of two hearts shackled by a dollar sign, auctioned for exactly one dollar.