Movie Mad

A sun-bleached dreamer from corn-flat Kansas, Dorothy alights in Los Angeles armed with a nickel-plated obsession for slapstick gods, her fiancé Neal trailing like a timid ledger. The city, all bougainvillea and celluloid mirage, inflames her worship; she rattles off Keaton gags like catechism. Neal, corner-teller of a bank whose marble façade is as rigid as his spine, decides that the only route back to her diamond-ringed hand is through greasepaint and bamboo-cane alchemy. He becomes the Little Tramp—bowler hat cocked, brows inked into anxious circumflexes—waltzing into her aunt’s Spanish-tiled bungalow in full pantomime. Chaos detonates: vases become meteors, chandeliers swing like drunks, and the fiancée’s heirloom pearls vanish inside Neal’s oversized shoes. When the law’s long arm yanks him to a thirty-day stone-cell sabbatical, Dorothy’s celluloid fever breaks; she emerges from the projector’s glare disenchanted, her laughter soured into a thin medicinal smile. Release day finds Neal scrubbed clean of soot, hat in hand, waiting on the porch stoop, hoping the woman who once swooned at pratfalls might still love the ordinary clerk beneath the greasepaint.