The Huntsman

A Pullman car slices through pre-dawn fog; inside, Clyde, a wiry vagabond with the gait of a drunken marionette, filches a monocled count’s tweeds and slides into them like a snake slipping into last season’s skin. At the next whistle-stop he emerges—now ‘Count de Something’—onto a platform where brass bands, flustered flappers, and a gaggle of fox-hungry gentry await. Whisked to a manicured country club that reeks of old money and wet spaniels, he is fêted with champagne toasts, pheasant pâté, and whispers of dowries. The club’s plutocrats, desperate for continental cachet, stage a fox hunt in his honor: scarlet coats blaze against emerald turf, bugles shriek, hounds bay like polyphonic fate. Clyde, who has never bestrode anything sturdier than a barstool, is hoisted onto a skittish chestnut that promptly mistakes a garden hedge for the Aintree fences. Chaos detonates: top hats somersault, stirrups tangle with riding crops, and the fox—an astute vulpine Hamlet—exits stage left, unharried. Edgar Kennedy’s apoplectic huntmaster, moustache bristling like a startled porcupine, pursues our counterfeit aristocrat through hedgerows, beehives, and ultimately a duck pond where the false count’s soggy epaulettes reveal the frayed underwear of the masquerade. Yet the club, drunk on its own pageantry, chooses spectacle over scandal, pinning to Clyde’s lapel a medal meant for valor in a war he never fought. The film closes on Clyde cantering into twilight, pockets jingling with pilfered silver, the fox’s tail fluttering from his saddle like a surrender flag waved by reality itself.