Summary
A sun-bleached pastoral hallucination unfurls: two strangers trade false names like pressed flowers, each convinced the other belongs to the soil. Dick, urbane silhouette in borrowed overalls, mistakes Elsie for a milkmaid among the oat sheaves; Elsie, silk heiress slumming in gingham, takes Dick for a wage-hand with calloused palms. Their courtship is a folie-à-deux played out in golden haze until a locomotive back from the metropolis coughs up Spike, a feline burglar clutching a valise of skeleton keys. One swapped bag later, identities collapse like houses of cards in a wind tunnel. A trench-coated detective, Pinkarter, shadows the chain of errors through moon-mad lanes, collaring the lovers alongside the real thief inside a farmhouse that is not, in fact, being burgled. Jailhouse gaslight, mortification, paternal reclamation: Elsie is spirited back to marble halls, leaving Dick clutching a reputation tarred by misapprehension. Months dissolve; invitations circulate. At a Dunbar soirée dripping chandeliers, the erstwhile farmhand strides in evening tails, confronts the girl who once smelled of hay, and the chandeliers quake when she screams “burglar!” Farce pirouettes into catharsis; masks slip, lineages align, and the final chord resolves in a kiss that tastes of restitution and fresh-cut grass.
Synopsis
Dick, who thinks Elsie is a farmer's daughter, and Elsie, who believes Dick to be a hired man, fall in love with each other. While returning from a trip to the city shortly afterwards, Dick accidentally exchanges traveling bags with Spike, a burglar, on his way to rob the Dunbars' summer home. Pinkarter, a detective, witnesses the incident and trails Dick. Late that night, the young man sees Elsie apparently breaking into a cottage. The girl had accidentally been locked out of the farmhouse where she had been stopping, and therefore decided to return to her father's country home nearby. Ignorant of this, Dick believes Elsie a thief and follows her into the house, Spike also gets inside, and the three are presently bagged by Pinkarter and lugged to the village lockup. In his effort to establish his identity, Dick requests the detective to examine his travelling bag. When this is done, a fine collection of burglar's tools is brought to view. Thus Elsie is led to think her lover a thief. Although Dick eventually clears himself, this comes too late; Elsie's identity has been established by her father, who then took her home. Still in ignorance of each other's identity, the heartbroken lovers return to the city. Some time later Dick accompanies a friend to a dinner given at the Dunbar's home. To his intense surprise, the boy finds himself confronting Elsie. Still believing him to be a burglar, Elsie shouts for help. Dunbar is about to hand the luckless youth over to the police when the snarl is untangled, and the course of true love allowed to run smoothly.
Review Excerpt
"
Imagine, if you will, a world where every glance is a masquerade and every whispered name a forgery. Doty Hobart’s The Pretenders (1923) arrives like a brittle love letter fished from a time-capsule, its edges browned but ink still flammable. The film doesn’t merely traffic in mistaken identity—it stages an entire carnival of misrecognition, a puppet-theater where the strings are made of class anxiety and the puppets keep forgetting they are puppets.
From the first iris-in on rolling farmland ..."
