The Husband Hunter

Myra Hastings, Manhattan’s most bewitching predator in pearls, treats courtship like blood-sport: she stalks, she baits, she bags. Kent Whitney—gullible heir to an oil fortune—becomes her newest trophy until jilted admirer Bob Harkness slips him a dossier on her capricious heart. Smarting, Kent concocts a counter-ambush, luring Myra to the family’s ramshackle country house where Dad cracks flatulent jokes, Mom languishes beneath a canine snowstorm, and the silverware is tin. Expecting champagne chivalry, Myra collides with vulgar farce; her humiliation is instant, viral, exquisite. She retaliates by staging a sham wedding—complete with rented parson, forged vows, and a desertion note that leaves Kent legally single but existentially gutted. Guilt ricochets; Kent’s pursuit becomes pilgrimage. On a dawn-slick pier he pleads for bona-fide matrimony, offering his name as both penance and promise. Myra, stripped of artifice, confronts the mirror her schemes have cracked; the film ends on a trembling maybe—two silhouettes bargaining for redemption in the salt-gray light.