Roars and Uproars

Posthumous mischief crackles through every reel of C.L. Chester’s one-off curio Roars and Uproars, a 1920s carnival in which the late, puckish tycoon P. Nutt—whose name alone sounds like a vaudeville rim-shot—weaponizes his own funeral. From beyond the marble tomb, he dangles a gilded carrot: his lakeside Xanadu, his railway shares, his cellar of pre-war claret, all conditional upon his dazzling, modern niece wedding a man the world dismisses as lunatic yet whom posterity must recognize as genius. The catch? The world’s idea of ‘genius’ skews wildly between a derby-hatted astronomer who talks to asteroids, a firebrand economist who eats only orange peel, and a penniless inventor convinced he can bottle thunder. What follows is a delirious scavenger hunt across ballrooms, boardwalks, and booby-trapped drawing rooms, each set piece cranked to farcical overdrive by pratfalls that feel like Buster Keaton on bathtub gin. The film’s gelatin-silver images practically sweat giddy panic as our intrepid heiress—equal parts Zelda Fitzgerald and Portia—races to separate diamond-mind brilliance from mere bedlam, while a Greek chorus of creditors, cousins, and cartoonish constables conspire to hustle the estate for themselves. Every iris-out feels like a wink from the grave, daring the audience to decide whether love, lucre, or lunacy will have the final laugh.