Summary
A daguerreotype of a bespectacled wallflower, brandished by a flippant sister, becomes the spark that detonates Jack’s urbane composure; the moment the flesh-and-blood version steps from the train, her supposed plainness dissolves into dangerous radiance, sending our hero into a burlesque panic that ricochets from bogus telegrams to slammed garden gates. What begins as a drawing-room farce—rivals circling like gilded vultures—mutates into a moonlit abduction, a roadside tête-à-tête inside a borrowed motorcar, and finally a matrimonial fait accompli delivered with the breezy inevitability of a champagne cork. The film’s DNA splices the elastic slapstick of <a href="/movies/all-of-a-sudden-peggy">All of a Sudden Peggy</a> with the toxic courtship rituals of <a href="/movies/the-fatal-marriage">The Fatal Marriage</a>, yet filters both through a modernist irony that anticipates the feverish geometries of <a href="/movies/the-cabinet-of-dr-caligari">The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari</a>.
Synopsis
A girl shows her brother, Jack, a character picture of her pretty friend, in which she wears glasses, and looks otherwise unattractive. When the young lady comes to visit, Jack sends himself a fake telegram to come to New York. As he is leaving the house the pretty girl is arriving. He suddenly changes his mind, but when he reaches the house she is being entertained by a couple of other young men. In the course of events he kidnaps her, and at the conclusion they are happily married.
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