Summary
A Manhattan skin-doctor, starved for cash, plunders a dusty Tuscan escutcheon, slaps the Bolognia griffin onto jars of cold cream, and—overnight—turns apothecary into aristocracy. Fame ferries across the Atlantic; a velvet-gloved herald arrives to drag the counterfeit baron home. Instead of vaults of Renaissance gold, Budd inherits a vendetta older than the crumbling stone lions of Siena: a bullet-bartered blood oath with a swaggering brigand who smells of olive groves and gunpowder. What follows is a feverish masquerade of tiaras and torches, of ballroom waltzes bleeding into moonlit ambushes, of talcum-scented Manhattan lofts echoing with Sicilian curses. The film pirouettes on the razor between slapstick and Grand Guignol, letting every pearl-encrusted laugh snag on the barbed wire of Old-World reprisal.
Synopsis
Dr. Arbutus Budd is a New York physician specializing in "beauty". His business is successful but he is still plagued by money problems. One day he gets an idea--he obtains the coat-of-arms of a long-forgotten Italian noble family, the Bolognias, and uses it as his logo on his line of beauty products. As luck would have it, the crest is recognized in Italy, and before long an emissary is sent to the US to bring back "The Baron". Budd is overjoyed, as he believes that he is about to inherit the Bolognia family fortune. However, it turns out that all he inherits is something he wasn't counting on--a blood feud with a local bandit.
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