Summary
A headstrong debutante, Kitty, flees the suffocating velvet of an arranged engagement, her Packard slicing through moon-dusted backroads until the engine coughs itself into silence beside a semaphore of wheat. On the same forsaken stretch, Robert—canvases spurned, heart flayed open by a femme fatale’s perfumed rebuff—stretches his frame across iron rails, inviting the midnight locomotive to finish what whiskey could not. Their trajectories collide: her stalled headlights catch the tremor of his suicide, his latent gallantry overrides despair, and suddenly two fugitives—one from society, one from self—share a grease-smudged fender like conspirators. The resurrected automobile sputters to a clapboard farmhouse whose owner, drunk on his own bucolic certainty, installs the “newlyweds” in a rose-papered chamber whose single bed becomes both battleground and confessional. At dawn, the father’s Packard roars up the lane, top hat bristling with patriarchal thunder; the door swings wide to reveal Kitty in a man’s oversized shirt, Robert barefoot, the quilt still warm with counterfeit sin. What follows is a choreography of threats, bribes, shotguns, ink-stained sketchbooks, and a justice-of-the-peace hurriedly summoned from a hay-bale pulpit—each twist tightening the corset of social farce until the only escape is a truth so implausible it must be love.
Synopsis
Young Kitty runs away from home to avoid marrying a man she doesn't love. Her car breaks down on a country road and she meets Robert, a young artist who has just been turned down by a woman he loved madly and is about to commit suicide by lying on the railroad tracks. He sees Kitty in trouble and decides to help her. They get the car running, but it runs out of gas in front of a farmhouse. The farmer, mistakenly believing that the two are married, has them share a bedroom for the night. The next morning Kitty's father shows up looking for her and discovers that she has "spent the night" with a stranger. Complications ensue.
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