The Book Agent

A tyrannical paterfamilias, clutching a vanity-printed tome like a papal bull, decrees that only the man who can liquidate his execrable prose may wed his porcelain daughter; what follows is a delirious carnival of door-to-door desperation, slapstick seductions of the marketplace, and the slow, hilarious erosion of literary pretension under the acid of commerce. Our hapless swain, armed with nothing but toothy grins and the absurd confidence of love, drags the unsellable book through barber shops, burlesque houses, and anarchist cafés, while each rejected page wafts closer to the bonfire of the patriarch’s ego. In the flicker of 1921 nitrate, the film becomes a sly treatise on art’s worth versus love’s necessity, a paper chase where every refusal stamps the father’s hubris deeper into the parched earth of American gentility.