Summary
Eleanor Douglas, veiled in tulle and jitters, teeters on the precipice of matrimony to a crusading district attorney whose résumé glimmers with civic virtue; the ceremony’s champagne fizz is laced with Hampton Del Ruth’s mischievous nitrate, turning sacrament into slapstick. A innocuous tumbler—handed by the debonair Dr. Paul Graydon, part physician, part serpent—becomes the chalice of catalepsy; Eleanor swallows, wilts, is pronounced extinct, and is summarily entombed beneath a marble slab that might as well be the final page of a fairy-tale. Yet a sable cat, equally victim to the potion, convulses, stiffens, and then—miraculously—resurrects, a furry oracle clawing at the lid of certainty. The shaken bridegroom, nostrils flared with gothic dread, exhumes his beloved only to confront an emptied casket yawning like a mouth without a joke. Tracking moonlit clues, he barges into Graydon’s clandestine surgery: there lies Eleanor, still swaddled in satin and orange-blossoms, etherized on a porcelain slab while the doctor sprawls lifeless, a bullet in his ribs. Handcuffs click, headlines scream, until Eleanor’s sister—torch-bearing, tear-streaked—claims the smoking gun. Fade-out. Cut to the altar: Eleanor’s eyelids flutter open from a mere swoon, the congregation exhales, and the dream implodes into reality, leaving only the aftertaste of orange peel and the echo of a cat’s satisfied purr.
Synopsis
The film begins in a comic vein--bordering on farce--and continues so up to the point where Eleanor Douglas is about to marry young district attorney William Bradley. She drinks the glass of water offered to her by Dr. Paul Graydon and loses consciousness. Pronounced dead by Dr. Graydon, Eleanor is buried; but a cat, which also drinks from the glass, apparently dies, is about to be buried, but suddenly regains consciousness. Bradley hastens to exhume Eleanor's body, finds the coffin empty, and finally discovers Eleanor at Dr. Graydon's--lying on an operating table, still in her wedding dress, the doctor on the floor dead. Eleanor is suspected of shooting Graydon, but her sister confesses. The scene then fades back to the wedding, where Eleanor awakens from a fainting spell and realizes she has been dreaming.
Review Excerpt
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Nitrate dreams rot from the inside out, and The Marriage Chance—that gleaming 1923 obscurity restored by an archivist’s stubborn love—oozes such decay while somehow still smelling like orange-blossom. Hampton Del Ruth, gag-man turned moral fabulist, stitches farce to Grand-Guignol with surgical twine, then yanks the seam so hard the whole wedding dress unspools into a shroud.
Look at the opening reel: a parade of pratfalls, rice like confetti shrapnel, Tully Marshall’s half-sozzled uncle mista..."
