The Galloper

Summary

A battle-scarred journalist, shackled by ex-wives and a balance sheet redder than any frontline, flees betrothal to a brewery widow the instant cannon thunder over the Balkans. On a smoke-wreathed steamer bound for Piraeus he collides with his most formidable ex-spouse, now veiled in Red-Cross white, while a wide-eyed American heir to a copper fortune mistakes her colleague for Aphrodite incarnate. Identity swaps, forged dispatches, and a tipsy donkey soon turn a sleepy Hellenic port into a carnival of thwarted vows and errant bullets. When the millionaire volunteers to ghost-write carnage under the correspondent’s byline, the masquerade snowballs: mistaken arrests, amorous ambushes in olive groves, and a finale where every ring finds the proper finger amid the smoke of premature peace treaties.

Synopsis

The story deals with a divorced war-correspondent who divides his time between dodging alimony-hunting divorced wives and various creditors. As a means of relief from his financial troubles he makes love to a brewer's widow, proposes, and is accepted. War breaks out between Turkey and Greece and he seizes the opportunity to dodge his trouble and a fiancée who does not appeal to him to go out as a war correspondent to Greece. It happens that a young American millionaire at the same time is sailing for Africa to hunt big game. On the same steamer are two charming girls who are going to the front as Red Cross nurses. One of them turns out to be the war correspondent's last wife; the millionaire immediately falls in love with the other. Arriving in Greece, the war correspondent finds dodging his former wife too strenuous and resigns his position. The millionaire offers to take his name and act as correspondent for him. From then on there are all sorts of comical misunderstandings and situations. Scene after scene is a riot of laughter up to the very end where misunderstandings are cleared up, the millionaire is accepted by the Red Cross nurse, and the war correspondent reunited with his former wife.