The New Adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford

Across fourteen bite-sized reels, the celluloid carnival known as The New Adventures of J. Rufus Wallingford pirouettes through the American hinterland like a vaudeville troupe that has swallowed a cyclone. Each episode is a self-contained confidence trick, a pocket-watch sleight performed by J. Rufus—part riverboat dandy, part dime-store Mephistopheles—and his hulking shadow, Blackie Daw, whose fists thud like bass drums beneath the nimble piccolo of Rufus’s patter. Together they descend upon sleepy Main Streets, gilded opera houses, and dusty rail depots, promising phalanxes of rubes a future paved with platinum and then vanishing before the asphalt has cooled, pockets clinking with yesterday’s promises. The serial’s architecture is episodic jazz: syncopated cons, hot-blooded getaways, and refrains of comeuppance that never quite resolve. One reel gifts us Wallingford auctioning the Florida everglades to snow-blinded northerners; another finds him selling the same town its own moonlight, bottled and corked. Between the grifts flutter chorus girls in ostrich plumes, cigar-chewing magnates whose waistcoats strain like overfed bulls, and a revolving-door parade of jealous sweethearts, Pinkertons, and small-town Napoleons—all shot through with the nickelodeon’s staccato iris-ins and chase-scene locomotive smoke. By the time the fourteenth curtain falls, the con men have been tarred, feathered, lionized, elected mayor, and railroaded out of existence, only to reappear on the horizon, thumbs hitched to infinity, grins wide as the Rio Grande. The cumulative effect is a kinetic fresco of 1919 America: giddy, gullible, forever chasing the next golden mirage.