Summary
Buckeye Bridge, Missouri, drowses beneath a sun that seems to bleach decency itself. Into this crucible of limestone dust and gossip glides Andy Freeman, a tin-silvered troubadour of household gadgets, his smile as bright as the sample case that never leaves his palm. His bride—unnamed by the film, yet as luminous as celluloid allows—trails behind like a reluctant comet, her eyes already tethered to the quarry-scarred horizon where Arnold Driscoll, the town’s unofficial titan of gravel, looms. Freeman, peddler by trade, puppet-master by pathology, has unearthed a buried valentine: once, long before vows and ventilators, his wife and Driscoll danced to a fiddle that now only plays in memory. Rather than mourn the past, he weaponizes it, staging daily reenactments of affection under the guise of hospitality. Every dinner invitation, every moonlit stroll he insists they share, becomes a scalpel slowly slicing at the woman’s composure. Freeman’s genius lies in masquerade: he limps through the general store, sighing to locals that his heart, not his leg, is shattered, letting suspicion pool like rainwater in hoof prints. When the inevitable pistol crack splits the dusk, Freeman’s corpse sprawls across a stack of unsold tinware, a still-life of commerce and carnage. Driscoll and the widow-to-be are clapped in irons, dragged toward a cottonwood whose branch already bears the rope-burn ghosts of prior judgments. Salvation arrives in the form of a drifter whose wife Freeman had spirited away years earlier; his confession, raw as creek-bed gravel, halts the noose mid-swing. The quarry whistles resume, the river reclaims its murmur, and in the flicker of a final iris-in, Driscoll and the woman clasp hands—two survivors stitched together by scandal, exonerated by coincidence, wedded less by love than by the sheer gravitational refusal to let one man’s venom define them.
Synopsis
Andy Freeman, a traveling salesman popular throughout the state, brings his young wife to live at Buckeye Bridge, Missouri where Arnold Driscoll, who operates a quarry, also resides. Freeman has discovered that Driscoll and his wife were once sweethearts, and he forces them to see each other constantly, hoping to cause his wife anguish. Posing as an injured husband, Freeman stirs up suspicion against Driscoll and the woman. After a struggle, Freeman is found dead, and Driscoll and Mrs. Freeman are arrested. A mob is about to lynch the pair when suddenly a man appears, confessing that it was he who shot and killed Freeman, because the latter ran away with his wife. Finally, Driscoll and Mrs. Freeman are happily wed.
