Summary
A pickpocket’s waltz through the silk-stocking chaos of post-war Long Island: Jack Dougan, a sartorial jack-o’-lantern with fingers faster than mercury, and his paramour Nell—half siren, half shadow—crash the nuptials of Madge Carr, a porcelain heiress whose dowry sparkles like a constellation. Nell, veiled in maid’s cotton, glides past footmen and flutters of gossip; every stolen candlestick becomes a stanza in her clandestine poetry. Meanwhile Madge’s father, a compulsive magpie cloaked in respectability, pockets cufflinks like rosary beads, each theft a muffled mea culpa. The groom, a deer-eyed broker, suspects his own reflection of larceny. Enter the detective—badge gleaming like a secular Eucharist—only to be ambushed by Dougan, who slips into the lawman’s skin with the ease of a silk glove. Identity pirouettes, doors revolve, silver vanishes, and the film’s moral compass spins like a roulette wheel until the lovers, cornered on a moonlit dune, confess to the very family they robbed. Absolution arrives not as penance but as farce: a double wedding where stolen vows are returned as gifts, and the church bells chime in kleptomaniac harmony.
Synopsis
When Jack Dougan and Snatcher Nell, partners in crime as well as love, decide to purloin the gifts at the wedding of Madge Carr to James Cluney, Nell poses as a maid to gain entrance to the household. Soon after, articles begin to disappear and Madge's father, a kleptomaniac, begins to feel guilty, while the groom almost suspects himself. A detective is summoned, but Dougan, pretending to be Cluney, waylays him, pickpockets his badge, and then impersonates the officer of the law. After various adventures, Nell and Dougan make a getaway but, eventually cornered, return to the Carrs and tell their story. All is forgiven and the two couples share a double wedding ceremony.
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