Summary
A frantic ballet of fiscal desperation and matrimonial maneuvering, Reckless Romance follows Jerry Warner’s high-stakes gamble to secure the hand of Edith Somers. Thwarted by a paternal gatekeeper, Jerry enters a Faustian pact involving a thirty-day retention of ten thousand dollars. His strategy—a chaotic mixture of speculative stock acquisition and a faux-adulterous entanglement with the Skinners—serves as a quintessential example of silent-era situational comedy, blending the absurdity of legal loopholes with the volatility of the early twentieth-century market. The narrative pivots on the precariousness of social standing, where a man's worth is measured strictly by his ability to maintain a bank balance against the gravitational pull of misfortune and comedic coincidence.
Synopsis
Jerry Warner falls in love with Edith Somers but cannot obtain her father's permission to marry her. Jerry is given $10,000 by his uncle, however, and makes a proposition to Edith's father: if Jerry can retain the money for 30 days, Edith's father will withdraw his objections to the marriage. Edith's father agrees. Jerry immediately invests half of the money in an apparently worthless stock and lends the other half to a friend. Desperate for money, Jerry then accepts the offer made by his friends, Beatrice and Christopher Skinner, that he act as the corespondent in a temporary divorce they must obtain in order to prevent Christopher's disinheritance. After numerous complications, the Skinners manage to stay married, and the value of Jerry's stock doubles, enabling him to claim Edith for his own.
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