Summary
Two hapless ragamuffins, custodians of a garish, porcelain-eyed mannequin they’ve triumphantly raffled, are summoned by the diamond-dripping Millionbucks twins to parade their booty at a soirée dripping with champagne chandeliers and whispered dowries. Fate, ever the prankish scenarist, swaps the inert prize for a wriggling, crimson-cheeked human foundling abandoned like a half-finished limerick on their threshold. In a panic stitched with bootleg wit, they cram the squalling bundle into the doll’s miniature tuxedo—an absurd papoose of satin and denial—before hustling toward the ballroom. The cosmos, however, has choreographed a Keystone cascade: cops, reward posters, and a fruit-vendor’s weary wife who already juggles twelve clamoring mouths. The infant, it transpires, is not the missing heir to some gilded dynasty but merely the thirteenth refrain in a working-class lullaby; the mother, exhausted beyond shame, refuses to reclaim the note that ended up on her doorstep. Our bewildered protagonists thus ricochet from potential windfall to public menace, their arms full of borrowed life, their pockets empty of answers, while the doll—now headless in the scuffle—grins from the gutter like a deposed monarch.
Synopsis
The boys have won as a prize a life-size baby doll. Their very particular friends, the Misses Millionbucks, request that they bring the doll to a reception which they are holding. Before the reception takes place, however, a real baby is left at the door of their room, and the situation is covered by dressing the baby in the doll's dress suit. The boys are nabbed before they are able to return the baby to its parents for an offered reward. It turns out, however, that the child belongs not to riches, but to a fruit dealer's wife, who already has twelve children and refuses to shoulder the responsibility of the thirteenth.
Review Excerpt
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Imagine a world where toys breathe and humans become toys—then remember you don’t have to imagine; you only have to rewind to 1920, when slapstick still nursed a grudge against the upper crust.
Oh, Baby! lands like a custard pie hurled inside a Fabergé egg: exquisite fragility shattered by anarchic goo. The film’s engine is a simple swap—doll for baby—but the reverberations ripple outward like gossip through a dowager’s drawing room. The boys, played with elastic-limbed abandon by Hugh Fay and ..."
