Summary
Dick Tavis, a Manhattan gadabout with the attention span of a hummingbird, purchases a sun-scorched Wyoming spread because a stock-tip whispered over bootleg gin convinces him that bovine gold lies in the marrow of the prairie. The cowboy mirage—dusty sunsets, stampedes, the mythic lowing of cash-cow herds—shrivels into blistered monotony once the first blizzard erases the romance. One winter dusk, frostbitten and listless, he pins a crimson-edged advertising calendar above the pot-bellied stove; the lithograph girl, half Venus-half Gibson, returns his gaze with ink-stamped promise. Her eyes ignite a reckless pilgrimage that drags him from sagebrush to spa chandeliers, from saloon poker to ballroom masquerade. The girl proves to be flesh: the orphaned heiress Hope Merriweather, ward of the same huckster who palmed off a barren ranch on Dick. Revenge, courtship, and farce entangle—Dick dons bombazine and feathered hat, becomes the widowed "Mrs. Devere" at a Saratoga-style hydropathic palace, collects a court of panting suitors, and engineers a sting that strips the uncle down to his diamond studs. Cattle, calendar, corsets, and comeuppance fuse into a Western that pirouettes on gender farce long before the term screwball exists.
Synopsis
Deciding that there is money in cows, young New Yorker Dick Tavis buys a Western ranch; when the novelty has worn off he decides that there is also monotony. Then he falls in love with a girl on a calendar and takes a new interest in life, particularly after he discovers who the girl is. The fact that her uncle swindled him on the ranch does not matter. He figures he can take care of the uncle, and he does, but not until he has been forced to masquerade as a woman and have half the men at a fashionable resort fall in love with him.
Director
Cast
