Summary
A slapstick phantasmagoria set inside a dowdy provincial hotel where gravity itself seems negotiable, Over the Transom detonates the conventions of the bourgeois bedroom farce. Jimmie, the night clerk whose alarm clock is a plunge into a yawning well beneath his cantilevered cot, performs his toilette like a dadaist gymnast, limbs flailing against the void. His libido, however, is strictly pre-war: a quivering arrow aimed at Esther, the milkmaid whose bottles slosh with more than calcium. Into this hormonal hothouse barges Count Zeeplotinxophsky—part aristocrat, part hedge-maze of whiskers—whose mustache alone commands more close-ups than most leading ladies. Esther, intoxicated by the vertiginous bristles, consents to a moonlit abscondment, but the Count, ever the fiduciary, demands a dowry. The only collateral in sight is the hotel safe, currently serving as a nap-capsule for the somnolent house detective who clutches the day’s receipts like a teddy bear. A cartoonish explosion rips the door from its hinges without disturbing his REM cycle; loot and maiden are bundled into a roadster that circles the block and checks back in under an assumed name. What follows is a hall-of-mirrors pursuit: bellboys skitter through corridors, the clerk somersaults down laundry chutes, and the cavalry arrives in the form of a helmeted, axe-wielding women’s fire brigade led by a chief who recognizes the Count as her matrimonial relic. The film ends with the aristocrat stripped of both moustache and mystique, sprawled beneath the suffragette boot of comic comeuppance.
Synopsis
Jimmie the hotel clerk was original in the manner of his morning ablutions. His bed was built over a well into which he dumped himself when he felt that it was going to be hard to wake up. But after he was well awake he thought of nothing much but the hotel milkmaid, Esther. So engrossed was he with this fair one that the intrusion of Count Zeeplotinxophsky was regarded as a personal affront and a decided danger to his peace of mind. Esther's equanimity was also somewhat ruffled. She fell in love with the Count's mustache and decided to elope with him. But before he went the Count wanted to be sure of a dowry. The only one in sight, or rather in prospect was in the hotel safe. The clerk, the bellboy and the hotel detective were in the way. The latter was inside the safe holding the receipts in his hands. But he was asleep and even the explosion which wrenched off the safe door did not wake him up. Having secured the booty, and the girl, the Count ran around the block in his racing car and took a room in the same hotel. But the bell boy and the clerk shadowed him and at last drove him out. Jimmie followed him and the bellboy brought up reinforcements in the shape of the female fire department. The Chiefess discovered that the Count was her ex-husband, and all the comedy dropped out of his existence.
Review Excerpt
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A hotel safe becomes both womb and tomb, a milkmaid’s heart oscillates like a metronome set to allegro, and a mustache—yes, merely a mustache—upends the social ladder in Fred Hibbard’s delirious one-reeler Over the Transom. Clocking in at a hair under twelve minutes, this 1922 curiosity distills the entire silent-comedy cosmos into a shot glass and then hurls it across the lobby.
Let us begin with the wake-up call. Jimmie’s bed, cantilevered above a cavernous well, prefigures the surrealist g..."
