Sooner or Later

A Manhattan marriage, still fragrant with rice-thrown joy, curdles into midnight suspicion when Robert Ellis discovers his bride vanished; he dispatches his boon companion Pat Murphy on a truffle-hunt for infidelity. Pat, equal parts gumshoe and gadfly, storms the gilded corridors of the Waldorf-Astoria, collaring an Edna Ellis who answers to the missing wife’s name and silhouette. In a flourish of misguided chivalry he abducts her, dragging her back to Robert like a cat with the wrong canary. Before the champagne of victory can be uncorked, the genuine Mrs. Ellis glides through the front door, eyes blazing at the doppelgänger in her sitting room. The film pirouettes through bedrooms, speakeasies and silk-stocking pratfalls until Pat—now thoroughly entangled—realizes the hostage he dragged is the woman his heart was secretly mapping. Meanwhile Robert learns that his wife’s clandestine trysts were sisterly, not adulterous, renditions of sibling loyalty. In the echoing marble lobby of coincidence, masks slip, couples re-sort, and the city that never sleeps finally yawns at the comic fragility of trust.